Kevin Williamson of National Review Online contends it’s more accurate to say that the Democratic Party left Howard Schultz than vice versa.
My view of American life is one of short-term pessimism and long-term optimism. And here is a bit of optimism that I’ll share even though it risks my coming to regret it: I think this may be the last time I am obliged to write about the Clintons. The Clinton era is over.
Ask Howard Schultz.
The Nineties were a hoot of a decade, a decade that was, if it is possible for a decade to be such a thing, nouveau riche: flush and full of appetite, and not yet decrepit enough to be ashamed of it. It was a decade epitomized in these United States by Nirvana, the Clinton presidency, and Starbucks — each of which in its way exhibited the characteristic style of the Nineties, in which the countercultural ambitions of the Sixties were wedded to the frank cheerful materialism of the Eighties. …
… Schultz was a Clinton Democrat back when that meant Bill Clinton, though as a reliable donor he stuck with Herself, and he dutifully wrote checks to Barack Obama, John Edwards, the DNC, and others. But in 2019, he says he cannot in good conscience run as a Democrat. He is considering an independent run. “What the Democrats are proposing is something that is as false as the wall,” he says, indicating “free” health care, “free” college, and the entire litany of “free” things “which the country cannot afford.” He worries — oh, bless his pointy little head! — about the national debt, unfunded liabilities, and other examples of fiscal recklessness.
