SEATTLE — Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has faced a rocky reception since he announced last weekend that he’s considering an independent presidential bid – and it’s not clear his welcome will be any warmer when he brings his book tour to his hometown of Seattle on Thursday.
At least two ardent constituencies are planning to protest outside the theatre where Schultz is scheduled to speak: Democrats who fret his candidacy would hand President Donald Trump another term, and green-and-gold-bedecked basketball fans who haven’t forgiven him for selling the Seattle SuperSonics to a group that moved the team to Oklahoma City more than a decade ago.
“Howard and his public relations people may not be thinking clearly about what the reception is going to be,” said Adam Brown, who produced “Sonicsgate,” a 2009 documentary about the team’s sale. “It’s going to be a lot of Sonics fans reminding him how he betrayed the city.”
The 65-year-old billionaire and Democratic donor, who stepped down as Starbucks chairman last June, has been on a tour of talk shows and news interviews the past few days, coinciding with the release of his latest book, “From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America.”
He said he doesn’t intend to decide whether to run for president for several months, but the reaction from prominent Democrats has been swift. The party chairwoman in Washington state, top advisers to former President Barack Obama and the most powerful political action committee in Democratic politics are among those who have criticized him, saying an independent bid would likely split the opposition to Trump and make his re-election more likely.
At an appearance in Arizona on Wednesday he said he would “not do anything to be a so-called spoiler” who hands the 2020 race to Trump.
In Seattle, where 92 per cent of voters cast ballots against Trump in 2016, helping get him re-elected might be even less popular than selling off a beloved sports franchise.
Chris Petzold, a Democratic activist from the Seattle suburb of Issaquah, organized the protest Thursday. She said she remains sad about the Sonics departure, but the protest isn’t about that.
“Now is not the time to risk getting another four years with Donald Trump as president,” Petzold said. “If you want to fix it, why not fix it from within the system, instead of being your arrogant billionaire self? He’s just buying his way into this.”
Schultz has repeatedly said he doesn’t want to be responsible for Trump’s re-election, but that he believes there is a way to unite a significant portion of the public that identifies with neither major party.
In an opinion piece published Wednesday in The Seattle Times, Schultz acknowledged that he has a “complicated” relationship with Seattle, a city he first fell in love with during a visit to Pike Place Market in 1981. It’s the city where he grew a small coffee-roasting company into an inescapable global chain, where he and his wife raised their two children, and where the couple still lives.
Along the way he made Starbucks one of the first U.S. companies to offer stock options and health insurance even to part-time employees; more recently, it partnered with Arizona State University to cover tuition for workers who want to earn their bachelor’s degrees online.
In 2001, Schultz led a group of investors in buying the Sonics and the WNBA’s Seattle Storm for $200 million. Due partly to an unfavourable lease deal and the small size of KeyArena, where the team played, the Sonics were losing millions of dollars a year.
After being rebuffed by the Legislature in his efforts to win public funding to remodel the venue, Schultz sold the team for $350 million to the group that moved it to Oklahoma City and renamed it the Thunder. The Sonics were Seattle’s oldest professional sports franchise and the first Seattle team to win a national title since the Seattle Metropolitans won hockey’s Stanley Cup in 1917.
In his Seattle Times piece, Schultz apologized.
“I was so focused on getting myself and others out of a money-losing situation that I made a bad choice and failed to follow a principle that helped me grow Starbucks, which is to try to balance profit with humanity,” he wrote. “Selling the Sonics is the biggest regret of my professional life. … I do not expect my actions to be forgiven or forgotten.”
Some Sonics fans considered the apology long overdue — not to mention suspect, given that it coincided with the announcement of his presidential musings.
Schultz’s politics aren’t necessarily going to win him many fans in his liberal hometown, either.
In Seattle, voters rarely see a tax increase they don’t like; Schultz has called for entitlement reform and branded the calls of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats for big tax increases on the ultra-rich “ridiculous.”
Seattle was one of the first U.S. cities to approve a $15-an-hour minimum wage; Schultz opposed it, fearing it would cost jobs. The law remains popular, and economists say it has raised pay without any real impact on employment.
Schultz’s consideration of a presidential run even drew a rebuke from a fellow Seattle billionaire, early Amazon investor and outspoken liberal Nick Hanauer.
“What Howard calls ‘centrism’ is just trickle-down economics_tax cuts for the rich, de-regulation for the powerful, and wage suppression for everyone else,” Hanauer tweeted.
Gene Johnson, The Associated Press
