Howard Schultz Sounds Absolutely Terrified of a Bernie Sanders Presidency
On Thursday, billionaire coffee magnate Howard Schultz made his latest impassioned pitch for a independent 2020 White House bid, making him perhaps the first-ever presidential candidate with an approval rating of four percent to get a nationally-televised primetime special all to himself.
In a Fox News town hall moderated by Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, the former Starbucks CEO spent most of his allotted airtime hopscotching his way over hot-button policy issues, careful to never say anything that might betray the existence of a coherent worldview. He opined that the country needs "fierce, strict levels of control on the border to keep bad people from coming in," but declined to "get into a wall or anything." He proclaimed that everyone has a right to "affordable health care," excoriating Democrats and Republicans for their morally equivalent crimes of, respectively, supporting Medicare for All and working tirelessly to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He went on to hint that "universal catastrophic coverage" might strike what he views as a more appropriate balance of their competing positions, but neglected to share how he would actually implement such a scheme as president.
He earnestly harped on the three characteristics he values most—honesty, civility, and results—while never managing to define those terms beyond the sort of vapid corporate bromides you might see on an inspirational poster in a Starbucks break room.
Elsewhere, Schultz emphasized that Americans should believe the women sharing "concerning" stories of unwanted touching on the part of Joe Biden, but insinuated that the timing of their disclosures is perhaps a little fishy. "Vice President Biden has served the country for 40 years," Schultz said, demonstrating a nuanced grasp of the evidentiary relationship between immediacy of reporting and veracity of allegations. "He has been vice president for eight years," Schultz added, deftly showing viewers that he understands the constellation of factors that might make women reluctant to publicly discuss the inappropriate behavior of one of the most powerful men in the world. "The only thing I would ask is one question: Why is this coming up now?"
In a particularly inspired sequence, Schultz asserted that the most vexing, foundational problem in Washington today is that "the American people are not in the room." Thus, if he were to become president, he promised to put an empty chair at every negotiating table in an effort to discourage partisan rancor from further derailing the important business of governing. "That chair represents the American people," he explained. "We're not going to leave the room until we solve the problem for the American people!" Those of you who assumed no one in politics would ever deploy empty-chair imagery more ineptly than Clint Eastwood clearly underestimated Howard Schultz's ability to innovate.
Perhaps the event's only revealing moment came when Schultz discussed the potential consequences of Democrats selecting Bernie Sanders, who currently polls second among 2020 hopefuls and raised more than $18 million in the first six weeks of his campaign, as their party's nominee. Picking a "far-left person" who espouses "socialist" polices, he warned in an ominous tone, will guarantee a re-election win for Donald Trump. That, remember, is why he decided to explore an independent White House run in the first place: to provide politics-weary Americans with a centrist alternative to a left-wing Democratic extremist.
Strangely, the surging popularity among those same politics-weary Americans of so-called "socialist" ideas like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal went unmentioned. So did the results of a poll published just this week in which Sanders, in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup against Trump, finished a comfortable eight points ahead of the sitting president. And for whatever reason, the simple fact that any president who would raise taxes on the super-rich poses an existential threat to Howard Schultz's billions never came up.
