The Pursuit of Happiness

I drink at least 8 cups of black coffee a day. That may seem excessive but it ain’t whiskey and that’s the way I grew up. Everybody in Minnesota drank coffee all day long and only Lutherans destroyed it by adding cream and sugar. Imagine my confusion when I moved to Arkansas and no one drank anything resembling coffee, black or otherwise.

But things change. Hometown Scoop opened up on the Berryville Square, an urban madrigal with fine coffee, and Howard Schultz, the guy who taught America what coffee is supposed to taste like, is running for president. Coffee, and politics, is more interesting today.

Not everyone is pleased with Schultz’s decision. Democrats are in a tizzy because they think Schultz, an independent centrist, will fractionalize voters and assure the re-election of Donald Trump. They could be right. According to Gallup, 31% of Americans identify as Democrat, 24% as Republican, and 42% as Independent. If Republicans hold on to their base, as is likely, and suburban moderates and fiscal centralists – who primarily voted for Democrats in the last election – shift to Schultz, Trump will likely carry the Electoral College again.

Schultz has genuine qualifications. Unlike Trump, he’s a self-made billionaire who grew up poor and made money the old-fashioned way: he earned it. He pays his workers fairly and, unlike Trump, hasn’t made a career out of filing for bankruptcy and screwing painters and hotel maids out of their wages. And Schultz knows how to make a cup of coffee.

Democrats have bigger problems than Shultz. They failed to defeat Evil with candidate Lesser Evil because there’s a streak of meanness in our culture that can only be countered by the better angels of our nature. Democrats must become those better angels. They can start by heeding Mrs. Obama’s advice, “When they go low, we go high,” and recognize that the Republican Party suffers from Stockholm Syndrome and requires care, understanding, and a canoodle or two. Fix a bridge in Roswell, New Mexico, call it a wall, and they’ll be fine.

And Democrats can take Nietzsche’s advice too: “Don’t become monsters in the process of killing a monster.”