The former CEO of coffee chain Starbucks has said he is "seriously considering" running for president.Yeah, we've seen how well businessmen with no political experience have done as president since the dawn of the 20th Century (Hoover and Trump). The presidency is not the place to do an apprenticeship in politics.
Howard Schultz, who stepped down as the firm's boss last year, says he is considering running as a centrist independent candidate in 2020.
An independent president will also have zero political clout on Capitol Hill. Such a president would have no claim of loyalty on any of the senators or representatives.
Besides that, third-party candidates have only ensured that the party candidate closer to them ideologically loses. Ross Perot cost GHW Bush his second term. Ralph Nader[1] cost Al Gore the presidency.
This is a pure vanity project by yet another ultra-rich clown.[2] If these guys are so smart, then why aren't they out finding a cure for cancer, or figuring a way to establish human settlements on Mars? Maybe he could take on desertification and deforestation.
But he won't. Those things would be hard. Schultz probably figures that all he has to do is spread a few billion around; he can hire enough people and buy enough good press to win. It worked for Trump. it worked for Bloomberg when he got the NYC Council to toss out term limits.
Schultz is a bored retiree. He should take up fly fishing or scrapbooking.
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[1] May his name forever be an obscenity.
[2] This is probably the better argument for going back to 1960s-70s level of taxation.
5 comments:
Publicly funded elections, anyone?
-Doug in Oakland
And the Wonder-leader (wonder how he got this far to be president) tweets in one message: 1) insults Shultz insinuating he’s a coward, 2) calls him not smart and backhandedly claims he’s the smartest, and 3) best of all, admits to an emolument violation. As Bugs would say, “What a maroon”.
Dale
"Besides that, third-party candidates have only ensured that the party candidate closer to them ideologically loses."
0-for-2 with your examples.
*1992: I remember the polls. Clinton was third when Perot dropped out of the race, and Clinton's poll numbers dropped more than Bush' when Perot re-entered the race. Dean Lacey and Barry C. Burden reached the conclusion that Perot hurt Clinton more than he hurt Bush.
*2000: I remember the polls, too. The same Florida exit polls that had Gore beating Bush by 1 percent also had Bush winning by 2 percent in a race where Nader never ran. Solon Simmons, in his "One in Ten Thousand" paper, argued that, had Nader not run, Bush would have won Florida by a few thousand, and he would have also won New Mexico instead of Gore, finishing with 276 electoral votes instead of 271.
There were three relevant types of people who changed voting patterns due to the Nader run:
(a) Those who would have voted for Gore, but voted for Nader instead. (About 35-40% of Nader voters.)
(b) Those who would have voted for Bush, but voted for Nader instead. (They didn't want to vote for Gore because of Clinton corruption, but Nader gave them a better choice. About 20% of Nader voters fit this category.)
(c) Those who sat would have sat out the election, but voted for Gore because Nader ran.
Simmons identified the process that led to category (c) as follows (and I know some people who did fit that category):
(1) They started out apathetic regarding politics, and didn't see any difference between the parties.
(2) Nader's run gets them interested in politics, as he looks like a good alternative.
(3) As they become more interested in politics, they discover that there is, in fact, a big difference between the parties. Specifically, they see the Democrats as better than the Republicans.
(4) They decide to vote for Gore instead of Nader because of what they learned. (Remember, without Nader running, they would have stayed at home from apathy instead of voting for Gore. Nader's run was the catalyst here.)
Simmons looked at close races. In Florida and New Mexico, the members of categories (b) and (c) were more numerous than the members of (a). Thus, Nader helped Gore in those states. In Oregon, by contrast, the members of (a) were more numerous than the combined members of (b) and (c); therefore, Nader helped Bush in Oregon.
*If you really want to get technical, Pat Buchanan's run in 2000 helped Bush win Florida. Buchanan himself concluded that he took more votes away from Gore than from Bush due to the infamous butterfly ballot.
*In conclusion, politics can get very weird sometimes.
Also (I forgot about this earlier),
From 1921 to 1929, Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. Does that qualify as political experience?
No. Only running for office before, and winning, qualifies.
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