Daddy Starbucks

In a rather abrupt move, Steve Schmidt jumped the liberal ship MSNBC to serve as Howard Schultz' chief strategist.  Anyone who didn't see this one coming was wearing blinders, because guys like Schmidt never were interested in the Democratic Party.  They wanted to see a new Centrist hero emerge, and Schmidt and many other moderate Republicans and Independents think they have found him in Howard Schultz.  If they waited long enough they probably could have rallied around John Kasich, who is now a retired governor and has presidential aspirations of his own.  May still turn out that way.

Schultz embodies the Centrists' fever dream, which Paul Krugman calls "The Attack of the Fanatical Centrists."  In his op-ed piece, he lambastes this movement from the right, which wouldn't get any traction if they didn't label Democrats as lunatic leftists hell-bent on imposing a Venezuela-style socialism on America.  Schultz has played straight into this crowd, attacking Liz Warren's proposed 70% income tax rate on the uber rich and calling universal health care pure socialism.

Rest assured he wants the rich to pay their fair share of taxes and believes all the Affordable Care Act needs is a little bit of tweaking.  Like his huge lattes with just a single shot of espresso, he thinks a little coffee goes a long way.  He's built his business model by playing to the middle of social issues so as not to alienate anyone.  It hasn't always been successful.  He catches seasonal flack for his red holiday cups and his #RaceTogether campaign was a huge bust, but on the whole he has done well with his catchy marketing campaigns, as Starbucks has grown to become one of the largest coffee brands in the world.

Daddy Starbucks is banking on Americans wanting a good ol' middle of the road president, who won't embarrass the nation with his every tweet.  Schultz has written a book extolling the Horatio Alger myth, which he calls From The Ground Up.  He's been telling anyone who will listen how his Starbucks business model will work for the nation, and it seems a fair amount of persons are buying it, including Matt Bai.

To read Bai's homage to Mr. Coffee, we didn't have coffee shops until Howard Schultz came along.  Starbucks has become so ubiquitous in America that we forget there were plenty of coffee shops spread across this fair land before Starbucks went global.  This is not a new invention by any stretch of the imagination.  Coffee shops have a rich tradition in European and American culture stretching back several centuries.  It wasn't so much that Schultz saw where the trend was going, as he capitalized on it the same way Ray Kroc did back in the 1950s with McDonalds.  Starbucks is the McDonalds of coffee shops.  Mercifully, we have many other hamburger stands and coffee shops to choose from.

So, why Schultz?  I suppose it is his rags-to-riches story that appeals to many Middle Americans.  To read his wiki bio, he grew up in a Bronx housing project.  He was the first in his family to go to college.  He went from selling Xerox copiers to Swedish drip coffee makers.  He discovered Starbucks while pitching coffee makers in Seattle and the rest as they say is history.  It's quite a story, and those who bought into Starbucks early on, like my godmother, have been enjoying a great windfall from the stocks they purchased back in the 80s.

But, the Pacific Northwest is loaded with coffee shops.  His was neither the first nor the best on the Pacific rim.  Peet's Coffee uses the same model and it started out 20 years before in San Francisco.  If you have had Peet's you sure as hell don't want Starbucks.  What set Schultz apart is that he quickly spread his coffee shop across the US, where the others stayed close to home.  Soon Starbucks were popping up everywhere, and they have now spread around the world, thanks largely to his catchy brand name that alludes to the great seafaring novel, Moby-Dick.

As Naomi Klein pointed out in No Logo, brand is everything.  If you can make your brand sing you can draw in clients around the world.  Daddy Starbucks is now hoping the same magic will make him the next President of the United States.  He will be a kinder, gentler Donald Trump.

He can only do this by demonizing the Left as the current president is doing, albeit in a softer language.  Well, not too soft.  He hasn't resorted to nasty nicknames, but he has cast Liz Warren and Kamala Harris as radical socialists with their tax and health care plans.  He even went so far as to call their plans un-American, which is an odd thing given the tax rate on the uber-rich was 70% not that long ago.  Under Eisenhower, the tax rate was 90% on the wealthiest Americans.  Over the decades, the high-end tax rate has been steadily reduced so that it now sits at 35 per cent.

Yet, you would be hard pressed to find any upper millionaire or billionaire who pays that much.  When Mitt Romney ran for president in 2012, he struggled to pay 12 per cent.  Trump apparently hasn't paid any income tax since the 1990s, spreading his losses from his Taj Mahal fiasco over successive tax returns.  Jeff Bezos declares his salary at $82,000 per year, despite being worth over $100 billion.  These guys find every way possible to disguise their income so as not to pay taxes.  In Bezos' case, he doesn't even want to pay full FICA, which is capped at $128,700.  I can't wait to see Schultz's return, if he chooses to make it public.

Krugman is spot on.  These so-called Centrists are happy with the status quo.  In fact, the only problem they have with Trump is his big mouth.  If he would just pipe down and let the economy run on its own volition, rather than shake it up with all his untimely pronouncements, everything would be hunky-dory.  Leave it up to the corporate tycoons to set wages and provide health care and other benefits for their employees.  We don't need the government intruding on business, even if Medicare covers fully one-third of all Americans in this country and is the largest health care payer.

For now, the mainstream media is letting Daddy Starbucks play both sides against the middle, content to see someone new shake up the political scene.  They've all but ignored the five women who have declared their candidacy and Julian Castro, the lone Hispanic to enter the race.  Big media is drawn to the paternalistic image of 65-year-old Howard Schultz, who will restore some kind of balance to American politics.  At least until John Kasich chooses to run.