SETH MICHAEL MEYER
Staff Columnist
Make no mistake: former CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, may say he is considering running on an Independent presidential ticket in 2020, but he will really be running as a “fiscally-responsible” liberal. The idea of a Schultz independent campaign has Democrats nervous that they will lose the 2020 presidential race to Schultz’s centrist, socially-liberal-fiscally-conservative agenda.
In a tweet posted in late January, Schultz said, “I love our country, and I am seriously considering running for president as a centrist independent.”
Since then, many people have criticized his contemplation, accusing Schultz of being arrogant.
Some political commentators, such as Jim Messina, President Obama’s former campaign manager, believes Schultz could ruin the entire 2020 election.
Messina writes, “He can’t win, and he could seriously damage our ability to beat Donald Trump. He should either run as a Democrat, or spend his time and money doing something that won’t ruin the world.”
That’s pretty rough.
If Messina’s prophecies come true, this wouldn’t be the first time that a third presidential slate drastically changed the outcome of the race. Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaign may have cost Democrat Al Gore the presidency as he lost the state of Florida by less than 600 votes. Nader received about 97,000 votes in Florida.
Howard Schultz may be the worst thing for the Democrats in the near future (Donald Trump probably couldn’t pull off a re-election on his own merit, see FiveThirtyEight poll), but he’s the best thing that the country needs now.
Americans born in the past 10 years have been raised to see Washington D.C. as no more than a boxing ring for rational and irrational ideologies, alike.
From the right, radical stances on immigration laws persist as conservatives move on from the all-but-lost war against a woman’s right to an abortion. From the left, rising stars, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admit that bread-lines are good and person property is immoral. Those two are now contributing to a big shift to the socialist left for Democrats.
Schultz, a former registered Democrat and contributor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, left the party citing policies that would financially cripple America as the cause.
“I don’t affiliate myself with the Democratic party which is so far left which basically wants to take over healthcare . . . the government to give free college to everybody, and the government to give everyone a job which is basically forty trillion dollars on the balance sheet of twenty-one-and-a-half trillion dollars,” Schultz said on a segment of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
With Schultz not giving any thought to running as a Democrat, the Democrats are stuck between a Trump and a hard place.
For any chance of a Dem-controlled White House, they need to have a candidate that can do two things: unite their fractured party, and they have to appeal to the wavering Republicans and fiscally-conservative Independents (a task they will never accomplish with budding socialists).
If the Dems can’t pull together that kind of candidate for the 2020 presidential election, they will prove that they are less-unified than ever, which could lead to a huge and unpredictable restructuring of the Democratic party.