Big Coffee Weighs In

The Starbucks CEO is on a crusade:

"We are better than this." That's the message Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wants Congress and America to hear, according to full page ads in the New York Times and USA Today, where Schultz invites "concerned Americans" to take part in a teleconference tonight, to address what he calls the "pervasive failure of leadership in Washington."

What's got him so hot under the collar? Schultz has made no secret lately of his disgust with what he deems an unacceptable level of partisanship and political wrangling in Congress.

Conservatives reading this will probably immediately smell a rat, one of the same variety that came from Sheriff Diptet after the Giffords shooting. In other words, those wingnut hostage-taking Republicans are off the rails and must be stopped! This cannot stand!

But would a coffee giant risk alienating the Tea Party, who no doubt drink coffee, too? Maybe. Perhaps they've done some market research, maybe with the help of jaded former GOP consultants, and discovered that such people prefer not to part with 2-3 bucks for a 'tall' cup of coffee they can get at Mickey D's, Waffle House, Krispy Kreme or Duncan Donuts for about half the price. Conservative folks tend to be conservative, after all. Starbucks currently has a big Halloween ad campaign running on the NY Times website that doesn't appear to be running on Fox News dot com.

Then again maybe he's truly scornful of both sides. His letter sounds positive. Of course that's a risk too since it might tend to tick off ALL his customers, so we'll have to wait and see how the national townhall telcon goes tonight. If he gets on there and advocates a new tax code without loopholes and definitive non-phony spending cuts, with some modest tax increases for the "rich" then perhaps he's for real. But if he says something like, "let's take those sons-of-bitches out!!!" followed by a Dean scream then we'll know for sure.