On January 30th, I wrote on this site:
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing among liberals upset that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is considering running for president as an independent. The belief is that such a third-party run would drain votes from whoever the Democrat candidate is. While that may be true, you don’t have much to worry about. Schultz may have a billionaire’s ego, but he’s quickly finding out he’s not that popular. It’s one thing to convince people to pay $5 for a cup of coffee. It’s quite another to believe you can be elected president in modern America without a hint of charisma. Schultz has less personality than a mocha frappuccino. When he’s done with his book tour — this couldn’t possibly be a publicity gambit to sell more copies of his autobiography, could it? — he’ll withdraw his name from consideration and cancel any plans to run. Mark my words.
This week, Schultz did a town hall on CNN. It got the lowest primetime ratings of any weeknight show on that network in years. Not only that, but Paul Farhi of the Washington Post noted that after an hour of publicity and exposure, Schultz’ book (“From The Ground Up”) actually fell in popularity on Amazon to #398. A day later, it had dropped to #504, and as I write this, it is ranked #621. Considering it came out two weeks ago and he got a ton of free press and TV interviews, that’s a pretty good indicator that Americans don’t give a frapp about Howard Schultz.
If he’s 1% as smart as he claims to be, he’ll recognize that (and notice that the political punditry has stopped talking about him completely) and drop the “I’m thinking of running for president” gambit.