Is Someone Getting Howard Schultz To Give Up His Destructive Role In The 2020 Cycle By Giving Him A Role As A Targanian In The Long Night?

George Clooney is staying out of the primaries but plans to back whoever the candidate is against Trumpanzee. He feels confident Trump will be a one-termer, although he worries that the Starbucks guy could screw up everything. "The narrow edge he took to get there in 2016 has all gone so yes, I do [think he can be beaten]. We just have to not have third party candidates like [former Starbucks CEO] Howard Schultz... I’m not a fan at all. If [Schultz] wants to run as a Democrat as he says he is then you should run as a Democrat, not try and lead the process before you even got started."

My guess is that Schultz would like a graceful way too get out of this whole mess he created. The problem is that he's hired all these high-priced hookers consultants who are not letting their meal ticket vanish so quickly. Take Bill Burton for example. He worked at the DCCC and parleyed that, eventually, into a big gig as under Deputy White House Press Secretary Obama and an even bigger gig with the Priorities USA SuperPAC. More recently he ran the California operation of a sleazoid Democratic consulting firm, SKDKnickerbocker (owned Mark Penn). Burtion was getting a mega-paycheck at SKDKnickerbocker when Schultz wooed him away with promises of God-knows-how-much loot.

And Burton is just one example of consultants who have attached themselves to Schultz's billions. One of them, not Burton, told me that none of them think Schultz is going anywhere but that the money is great and that there's not much they have to do. And especially now, while Schultz is laying low and "waiting for Biden to self-combust," as that same top Schultz consultant told me.

Yesterday, the Daily Beast reported that Schultz's campaign is basically dormant, if not dead. Burton claims that Schultz is still considering running and that he'll announce his decision "in the late spring or early summer." (My contact in the campaign operation told me they figure Biden will screw up by then, leaving Schultz with a path to victory. I asked him if they were all drunk over there and he laughed, well aware that Schultz issuing strung along by people dependent on him for a paycheck.)

Erin McPike says he's recovering from back surgery and that that's why there's no campaign. Oh.

"But Schultz has also dialed down the elements of his campaign prep that don’t actually require public appearances," wrote Sam Stein. "He has not posted to Facebook or Instagram since April 30. His last missive was on how leaders make decisions 'through the lens of personal beliefs' which included a photo of a chess board, a French press, a cup of coffee and a diary with the phrase 'success is best when it's shared' written in black sharpie marker."

According to Facebook's ad archives, Schultz has not run an ad on the platform since April 23, when his account posted a spot that declared "It's Time To Un-Partisan.” Since Easter, Schultz has tweeted just twice. The first was to promote an op-ed he wrote on his trip to Arizona. That was on April 29. The second, and last, tweet came on Monday, when he tweeted a winky emoji at someone wondering if he was a character in Game of Thrones, after a cup of Starbucks was mistakenly included in a scene of the popular HBO show.

And it’s not just Schultz. Neither Steve Schmidt, his top adviser, nor Burton have tweeted since late January.

“The next president is not going to be decided on Twitter,” Burton said. “I would think if you looked at what he is doing publicly it stacks up with a lot of people engaged in the national conversation.”

That was once true. In the beginning of April, the Schultz media team was sending out statements on various relevant issues and informing reporters about upcoming events like his Fox News town hall in Kansas City, Missouri. After that, Schultz initiated a “Heart of America” tour that took him to Kansas. That same week, his team sent out a statement about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) Medicare for All proposal and sent a dispatch about his travels including information about Kansas farmers’ lives being impacted by Trump trade policies. The tour then headed to Arizona where it appears stopped—at least for now—because of his surgery.

There has been one major development that happened in the 2020 election since Schultz’s trip to Arizona: the formal entrance of former Vice President Joe Biden into the Democratic primary. Biden is an establishment figure with a lengthy record that places him a fair distance away from his party’s ideological left. In short, he’s the very type of candidate that Schultz has said would convince him to ultimately not enter the presidential race. But Burton stressed that the former VP’s presence was not a factor-- at least yet-- in Schultz’s thinking.

It isn't likely that anyone has written Schultz into the final episodes of Game of Thrones but he may have been offered a role in the prequel (set 5,000-10,000 years before the one we're watching now), possibly titled The Long Night. Jane Goldman, Carly Wray, Max Borenstein, and Brian Helgeland are writing it now and one of them could have offered Schultz a role, along with Dixie Egerickx, Denise Gough, George Henley, John Simm, Naomi Ackie, Jamie Campbell Bower, Ivanno Jeremiah, Alex Sharp, Toby Regbo and Richard McCabe. Coffee-drinker and A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin said, "Speaking of television, don’t believe everything you read. Internet reports are notoriously unreliable... We have had five different Game of Thrones successor shows in development (I mislike the term 'spinoffs') at HBO, and three of them are still moving forward nicely... The one I am not supposed to call The Long Night will be shooting later this year." The hope, of course, is that Schultz will accept a role as some minor Targaryen, who can be cut out of the film later, after he doesn't run and doesn't help Trump win a second term.

Howard Schultz Targaryen (of the Night's Watch)

PR Powerhouse to Democrats: Don't Be Mean to Starbucks

Starbucks being non-political

by Thomas Neuburger

Something to notice at the periphery of the Democratic Party festival of ghouls and delights known as the 2020 primary campaign. It's going to be a rich and interesting race if one is a novelist looking for material, but this especially caught my eye.

One of the announced candidates is former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who's offering to fill the Democratic Billionaire slot he thinks the Party needs in its suite of offerings (see "2020: Year of the Anti-Trump Billionaire?")

Starbucks is a company with $22 billion in annual revenue and $14 billion in assets. Normally companies don't pay a price when people who own and run them are exposed as the reason the country's in so much trouble — for example, I don't think Chick-fil-A has suffered much despite the 2012 revelation of the virulent anti-gay prejudice of its boss, Dan Cathy. Their apology tour came and went about as fast as the controversy.

But Starbucks is taking no chances. It has tasked Democratic PR and consulting powerhouse SKDKnickerbocher with making sure that any Democrat who criticizes Schultz leaves Starbucks out of it.

Top Progressive Firm Tells Dems to Leave Starbucks Alone

One of the top Democratic firms in the country is privately urging top officials in the party to leave Starbucks out of the burgeoning feud with the company’s former CEO and presidential aspirant, Howard Schultz.

Officials at SKDKnickerbocker, a progressive public affairs and consulting firm, have been reaching out to Democratic operatives in the last week expressing fear the animus
directed at Schultz over his proposed independent presidential bid was having a spillover effect on the coffee conglomerate he used to lead.

One operative on the receiving end of the outreach said that the firm, which lists Starbucks as a client, offered to put a top Starbucks executive on the phone to discuss concerns over the politicization of their company in response to a prospective Schultz campaign.

“They really wanna make sure that Democrats and liberals aren’t going after Starbucks and are stressing that it’s not fair to the company,” said the operative, who relayed details about the conversation on condition of anonymity.

SKD's message: No money should be harmed in the unmaking of that man.

Their argument is that since Schultz no longer runs Starbucks, the company shouldn't have to suffer for what he does. The counter-argument is that his whole sell as a candidate is that he was the guiding light and CEO of Starbucks. So, how in the clear is Starbucks? I guess the market will decide. If enough people boycott Starbucks (their fear) out of revulsion for Schultz, the market will have spoken.

Starbucks, of course, is taking no chances; thus the SKDKickerbocker warnings to Democratic bigwigs and operatives.

Two added points. First, companies should suffer for the sins of their owners and managers. Companies are force extenders for the very very wealthy, and leaving them to operate without consequences empowers those who do horrible things with the money and power that controlling those companies gives them.

The best way to hurt people like Chick-fil-A's Dan Cathy is to hurt Chick-fil-A. Same with Lowe's. Same with Georgia-Pacific. Same with Whole Foods. Those kinds of consequences seem never to occur, but they should. And Starbucks is no slice of angel food cake.

Second, SKDKnickerbocker is not a "progressive firm." It's an extremely powerful, extremely wealthy mainstream Democratic Party service organization, embedded deep in the Party's ecosystem. Its clients have included Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg, Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, and many many more. They were involved in defending the Keystone XL pipeline, among other sins. The firm is owned by Mark Penn, chief strategist for the Clinton 2008 campaign.

The takeaway from all this simple: Criticize the rich if you want, but don't endanger their wealth; that must be left intact. Which tells us this is exactly where we should hit them.

Just something that caught my eye on the road to the coming festival.