The Audacity Of Schultz

Howard Schultz appears to have dramatically misread America’s appetite for sending a coffee mogul to the Oval Office. Is the backlash specific to one billionaire exec’s hubris—or have we lost our taste for CEO candidates once and for all?

- Beth Kowitt

FORMER LONGTIME Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has nailed countless product rollouts over the years. He is, after all, the man who introduced America to pumpkin spice lattes, made the frappuccino a household name, and persuaded us to order our drink sizes in Italian even when we’re in Des Moines.

But when Schultz announced that he was considering running for President as a “centrist independent”—essentially making himself the product he needed to sell—the launch blew up in a fiery ball of Internet fury.

“New Coke had a better rollout than Howard Schultz 2020,” tweeted Brian Fallon, a former Hillary Clinton press secretary. “Why doesn’t Howard Schultz just try to go to space like a regular billionaire,” wrote Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri on Twitter.

Given the ex-CEO’s credentials, some—including Schultz—were surprised by the extent of the outcry. In addition to building a legitimately successful business, Schultz was one of the early leaders of the CEO activist movement. He was lauded for offering progressive worker benefits. He took on gun control and gay marriage before either was a topic most executives would even touch. He once led a group of CEOs in vowing to end political contributions until Washington got its act together. And in the wake of Trump’s travel ban from Muslim-majority countries, he pledged to hire 10,000 refugees.

But there’s a big difference between the desire for a CEO to take a run at a political issue and the desire for a CEO to run for political office. Schultz, it seems, conflated the two.