Someone To Watch

Howard Schultz

Washington Post analyst Aaron Blake thinks that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is thinking of running in the Democratic primary for president in 2020. Fine by us. At the very least, Schultz has been jolted into political alertness by the rainless thunderhead called Trump.

Schultz was speaking at a job fair on Wednesday, and while he did not mention Trump by name, the prez was indicted by implication:

The worst thing that we all, whether we be businesspeople or private citizens — we should not be embracing indifference right now. We have to be engaged, we’ve got to speak out, we’ve got to be involved, we gotta stand up for the things that we know are true. And I think the country, in many ways, is in need of a moral, a cultural and an economic transformation....

The whole issue is, we cannot have an America where so many people are being left behind. I found myself in Houston a week and a half ago after the hurricane. I wanted to see the aftereffects, but mostly I wanted to talk to people. And you learn a few things that are heartbreaking. You know, 40 percent of American households don’t have $400 of cash available to them. Only 2 percent of the people in Houston that I talked to had flood insurance — and probably those people were in the right Zip code. There’s tens of thousands of people in a shelter today. And so I think, if we think about the country today — and I’m not talking about politics — I think the country needs to become more compassionate, more empathetic. And we can’t speak about the promise of America and the American Dream and leave millions of people behind. And it’s my view that — leave Washington aside and all the politics aside — businesses and business leaders need to do a lot more for the people they employ, the communities we serve, and we can make a significant difference. And this job fair is emblematic of just that.

"I’m not talking about politics." It's a sign of the troubled times we're in, that if you talk about public compassion and empathy, you are talking about politics, since so many at the top of this government appear to lack those qualities.