During a live interview with Monica Guzman yesterday at Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz answered to what are two sore subjects for many locals.
Of course, most of the conversation focused on Schultz’s potential “centrist independent” bid for president in 2020, which he recently announced in a 60 Minutes interview.
He explained his logic behind exploring a bid, shared stories from his new book, and vowed both to not proceed if it would re-elect Donald Trump and to not run as a Democrat (despite a plea from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to do so).
“The Democratic party, as it stands today, is espousing, almost every day, very aggressive policies that I think are unrealistic and not affordable and, really, a false promise,” Schultz said.
In making his case to a hometown crowd, Schultz appealed to the city’s entrepreneurial spirit.
The two questions from Guzman that targeted local, thorny issues specifically involved the Sonics and a spotty local voting record.
In 2006, Schultz sold Seattle’s NBA team, the SuperSonics, to out-of-state investors; the team moved to Oklahoma City two years later. Schultz said sorry for the sale in his recent book, an apology that Seattle Times columnist Matt Calkins promptly rejected.
In yesterday’s interview, Schultz told his detailed account of tried-and-failed efforts to negotiate the team’s lease with Seattle’s city government, losing money, mounting pressure to sell, failed attempts to sell locally, and the eventual sale.
In answering a seemingly unrelated question about his spotty local voting record, one could draw a line back to his answer about the Sonics sale. Seattle Times Columnist Danny Westneat wrote earlier this week that Schultz has voted in just 11 of 38 elections since 2005.
When Guzman pressed him further, asking him what kept him from voting in the mayoral elections when he owned the Sonics, he responded by admitting again that he was disengaged with local politics.