In the wake of his announcement that he might run for president in 2020 as an independent, former Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz is dominating media attention and earning a huge amount of buzz.
There will be a lot of focus yet to come on his record at Starbucks and, inevitably, on Starbucks itself. But what about another of Schultz’s financial endeavors? If we’re going to scrutinize his tenure at Starbucks, we should also scrutinize his tenure as owner of the now-defunct Seattle Supersonics basketball team.
There’s a simple reason for this, and it’s not my lingering Sonics fandom: People who are successful in business often turn out not to be successful in the world of sports. People who are successful in business also often turn out to struggle in the political arena. So possibly, there are some clues as to how Schultz might transition to the political realm, potentially including the presidency, in his record as a business guy who tried, and ultimately failed, to transition well into the sports arena.
Let’s note for starters that a lot of Sonics fans, while probably interested in the notion of a hometown celebrity entering the presidential fray, still resent Schultz for selling the Sonics to Clay Bennett, who subsequently moved the team to Oklahoma City and renamed it.
At least at the time, Seattleites largely blamed Schultz for that result.
According to a 2011 poll conducted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 42.2 percent pointed a finger at him for the team’s demise (the broad category of “everyone” came in second in the blame stakes, with 15.8 percent).
That’s a hint that, like the current occupant of the White House, Schultz may both be polarizing and, when push comes to shove, prove not to care to quite so much about being popular or keeping people happy as he does about satisfying his own urges and impulses, which include not losing money and maintaining a measure of fiscal discipline (no surprise he’s already talked about worries about the national debt as an area where Republicans may align with him).
It’s natural that, in business, taking a hard-nosed attitude toward finances is necessary and desirable. But in the world of sports and politics, it is not. Fans want their team to stay in town, even if it costs the owners money. They also want the best players, even if it means ponying up stupid amounts of cash.
Voters, we see time and again, vote for fiscal indiscipline — low taxes and exorbitant amounts of spending. In Schultz’s Sonics tenure, we see hints of what could be a real mismatch between his priorities and those of many voters if push comes to shove — and a not-very-political tendency to prioritize his concerns ahead of those of a broader group of people he needs to like him in order to potentially succeed. That’s a potentially tricky and risky thing for Schultz — even if it may be attractive to a bunch of voters who want to throw all the D.C. bums responsible for generating ever more national debt and a higher deficit out of office and force some fiscal discipline, no matter how unpopular or politically painful.
It’s also worth remembering that Schultz earned those bad poll numbers after earlier tangling with star player Gary Payton, something not all Sonics fans exactly sided with him about, and after failing to get Seattle and Washington state politicians to agree to spend on either a renovation of the Jet City’s basketball arena or construct a new one.
Set aside that that endeavor may not endear him to the manifold opponents of public funding of sports stadia anyway (or convince some voters of his fiscal conservative bona fides). It’s also important because it indicates that as a sports franchise owner, and possibly a future politician, Schultz doesn’t have a record of meshing well with key figures in politics or popular culture, or figuring out how to get people with the ability to dig their heels in and scream “no” to do what he wants and says he’ll accomplish (a problem for a business candidate, who presumably will be campaigning on his ability to get tough things done where others have failed).
It also matters because Schultz appeared to many during the entire Sonics sale episode to act out of spite — at least some Seattleites regard him as having sold the team to stick it to his political nemeses.
The Seattle Times referred to Schultz’s “threatening” to sell if officials wouldn’t cut a deal to pay up. That, too, sounds like something voters have become pretty familiar with in dealing with politician brinkmen, again including the current occupant of the White House (see: “the wall”).
None of this is to say that Schultz wouldn’t be better on the issues (depending on what one’s priority issues are) than either the eventual Democratic nominee or indeed President Trump. If he runs, I might vote for him, and so might many others. But his Sonics tenure is an asterisk on what looks like an otherwise very successful career — and one that, like politics, is outside his natural lane. That’s an indicator that he might not bring quite so much “change” to our current politics as he may claim, should he run, and it’s something worth bearing in mind if he does.
Liz Mair is founder, owner, and president of strategic communication firm Mair Strategies LLC, a former communications adviser to the Republican National Committee, Carly Fiorina, Rick Perry, Rand Paul, and Scott Walker. She was born and raised mainly in Seattle and is a still-grieving Sonics fan who previously wrote for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and loves Starbucks.
