That Coffee Shop Billionaire for President thing isn’t going too well, is it? It seems the “extremists” on the far left aren’t too keen on yet another hopeless vanity candidacy like, you know, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.
On “60 Minutes” Sunday night Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced his interest in an independent run for president. By Monday, at a book event in New York City, a guy in the audience was yelling “egotistical billionaire a**hole”” at him. And that was about the nicest thing anyone had to say.
Schultz of course has no chance of winning. Only spoiling.
As vain and deluded billionaires go he’s a bland stiff, with no appetite for the kind of buffoonish, hyperbolic demagoguery that got Donald Trump elected, (thanks to the Russians and the electoral college.) But, as we’ve seen twice in the past two decades, vanity candidates have peeled away just enough votes from “flawed” Democrats (I’m still waiting for the first “pure” candidate) to hand the country over to two wholly incompetent characters — George W. and Trump.
In case you’ve forgotten, those squandered Nader-Stein votes have saddled us with a multi-trillion dollar war we didn’t need to fight, staggering levels of new debt, a ransacking of environmental and consumer protection regulations and a cratering of our reputation as a country that while pretty damned screwed in many respects, was at least more reliable about science and democratic allies than, you know Turkey or Honduras.
The psychology of chronic “righteous” voters, people who routinely pull the trigger for characters like Nader and Stein is less interesting than it is dismaying. The irony, in my experience, is that such people rationalize their vote in terms of “principle”. Namely, that nothing will change unless people like them — unusually moral and uniquely informed — don’t “vote their conscience.”
And obviously, through one lens, they’re right. They voted for Nader and Stein and we got lots of change. In addition to all that spendy war and economic mayhem stuff, were the “principled” Nader votes of 2000 switched over to dull, ponderous, compromised-by-Clinton Al Gore we would have had 19 years more years to do something about climate change. (Maybe we could have invested the trillions that weren’t borrowed from the Chinese to chase Saddam Hussein around Iraq.)
The 2020 campaign has begun and there are already more Democrats waving their hands than I can count. Most, like the messianic Mr. Schultz have no chance. But the top tier of current and likely Democrats is interesting.
Elizabeth Warren is, IMHO, too old, but a valuable factor in pushing the debate. Kamala Harris is getting gushy reviews for her launch, and she has my attention. Never mind if she once canoodled with Willie Brown. She impresses me as someone with the skill set for this moment — a moment where not just Trump but the entire ethos of the “movement conservative Republican party” has to be not merely defeated, but obliterated. As in: lopped off at the knees, bayoneted, burned, buried and covered with salt. The whole crowd, from Trump to Stephen Miller to the Freedom Caucus to Rush Limbaugh and FoxNews is that bad.
I don’t get that same essential vanquish-the-barbarians vibe from Julian Castro, the honorable congress lady from Hawaii, Kirsten (#YouToo Al Franken) Gillibrand — or waiting in the wings — Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker or Joe Biden.
Here’s the thing. Democrats have to put up a populist candidate.
Translated: Someone who understands what the dimwits who thought Trump was a better option than Hillary Clinton are thinking and (extremely important factor here) can talk their language. An educated variation on what Trump does with his MAGA rallies and with his racist moron whispering. The Democrats’ days of tossing up a wonky career bureaucrat who sounds like he/she has never smoked a joint, gone to a rock concert, eaten fast food because it tastes good or had an impure thought are over.
“The people” want someone who not just “shares their values” but has plainly “experienced their values”, including the ones they enjoy the most.
Invested liberals, like me and maybe you, don’t need TeenBeat populist charisma in our elected leaders. But the sad, undeniable fact is that in our celebrity-saturated culture, where millions of voters pay little-to-no attention to who is actually, truly doing something for them, people vote based on the “feel” they get from candidates. The feeling that he/she is “just like me”, as so many sad goobers said about cartoonish frauds like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.
Maybe Beto O’Rourke has the full toolbox of talents. All we know about him at the moment is that he ran as an unapologetic progressive in (bleeping) Texas, that he poured incredible energy into it without a serious screw up, talked at the retail level like a guy who once played in a goofy rock band and ascended to the level of a pop idol by the time he lost by 3% … in (bleeping) Texas.
That’s what the Democrats need, in someone else, if not him.
Nevertheless, being a hopeless skeptic, I have little faith that the “righteously principled” who saw Nader and Jill “Here I am in Russia dining with Putin and Michael Flynn” Stein as the best option for our times are scanning the horizon for the next “pure” independent who will bring us all real change … again.