For One Ad Man, a Leap of Faith

Mark McKinnon’s old photos fit together like a mosaic of Democratic idealism. There’s a shot of him hunched in a strategy session with Ann Richards, the acid-tongued former Texas governor, and legendary Democratic advertising consultant Bob Squier. And here he’s mugging for the camera next to James Carville and Paul Begala, two architects of Bill Clinton’s 1992 White House victory.

The images only suggest the chasm McKinnon crossed when he took his current job. He is the media consultant to Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush. That makes him a traitor in the eyes of one political party and a stranger in the eyes of another.

By the standards of the insular fraternity of presidential campaign consultants, McKinnon’s jump is almost unheard of. The biggest names in the business still are die-hard loyalists to one party. Those who switch, including McKinnon, are viewed with suspicion by both sides.

Last month, when a videotape of Bush’s debate preparation was mysteriously mailed to a supporter of Vice President Al Gore, McKinnon was an automatic suspect. Even now, the FBI investigation into the incident is focusing on McKinnon’s office assistant, and Bush aides are subtly defining her as an employee of McKinnon’s ad shop, not of the campaign itself.

But McKinnon’s switch is the leading example of a growing trend in the political media industry.

As the parties have moved to the center, they have shrunk the philosophical leap required to switch sides. And increasingly, the line between political and commercial advertising has blurred. Campaign consultants often work for major corporations, while Madison Avenue ad firms regularly are tapped by presidential aspirants.

Carter Eskew, the media consultant for Gore, took heat recently when the press learned he offered his services last year to the same pharmaceutical companies the vice president now is blasting for their drug-pricing policies. Last spring, Bill Bradley’s advertising during his campaign for the Democratic nomination was made by a group of New York media experts hired for their professional skills, not their political experience.

According to a survey conducted last year by American University, of 500 political consultants polled, 30% work for candidates from both major parties.

McKinnon, 45, is a former teen runaway and songwriter who spent more than a decade working for Democrats before he grew jaded by politics.

Now, four years after he dropped out of the campaign business, he is serving in a role that carries a lot of the GOP’s highest hopes. But instead of being a cheerleader for his new party, McKinnon says that “party affiliation is becoming less and less important to voters.”

“I think it is accurate to some degree to say the parties have both been moving to the center,” he said. “I think that [Green Party nominee Ralph] Nader is right about that.”

Personal Aspect Outweighed Politics

McKinnon and Bush met at a social dinner in 1997 organized by mutual friends. The consultant said he hit it off with the Texas governor, and, within a few months, he was working on Bush’s reelection campaign. But he says the attraction was more personal than political.

McKinnon’s shift is celebrated at Bush headquarters. For one thing, Bush strategists actually encourage him to talk about his switch--it’s another part of marketing their candidate as a centrist.

Joining the Bush team was “a decision that I wrestled with for a good long time,” McKinnon said. “I just came to realize that . . . what it’s really about is . . . who has the sort of life experience and intelligence and depth and sensitivity to exercise good judgment when it comes to decisions about public policy.”

Bill Miller, another Austin consultant who works for candidates from both parties, said, “It’s real simple: At the end of the day you get hired by the person. . . . Mark’s greatest gift is his ability to bond with the client. If you don’t have that ability, then you’re sunk.”

McKinnon’s switch is even more significant, given that he previously worked for Richards, who lost her 1994 reelection bid to Bush. McKinnon also served in the 1988 presidential campaign of Democrat Michael S. Dukakis when he ran against then-Vice President George Bush. In that race, the New York firm where McKinnon was a junior consultant, Sawyer Miller, devised a series of ads that portrayed a fictional group of consultants plotting to “package” Bush to make him more palatable to voters.

McKinnon’s leap across the aisle to the GOP has prompted some former colleagues to call him a sellout.

“It’s all about careerism and opportunism,” said Brian Rodgers, who worked alongside McKinnon for former Texas Gov. Mark White, a Democrat. Upon learning of McKinnon’s switch, Rodgers launched an anti-Bush Web site featuring the quotation: “Candidates without ideas hiring consultants without convictions to run campaigns without content.”

Others suggest that McKinnon is motivated by money, though he already lives comfortably just outside Austin. Bush has paid McKinnon’s advertising firm $1.8 million since the campaign started, much of it for production costs, and McKinnon likely will take in an additional $1.6 million or more in commissions from Bush’s fall ad spending.

McKinnon’s closest friends are more forgiving.

“I’m not happy with what he’s doing, but I know why he’s doing it,” said Begala, the former Clinton advisor, who met McKinnon when they were students at the University of Texas at Austin. “He fell in love. [But] I’m sure there’s a part of Mark that wakes up in the middle of the night screaming when he rolls over and sees Pat Robertson in bed with him.”

When the world last saw McKinnon, he was fed up with political theater. He announced in an essay for Texas Monthly magazine in 1996 that he was through as a campaign consultant.

“Maybe it was the candidate for statewide office who got so drunk he came on to a member of our film crew at a public restaurant while his wife and daughter sat horrified across the table. . . . Maybe it was the time I got so frustrated I screamed obscenities at a female statewide officeholder. . . . Maybe I got tired of candidates asking me what their firmly held convictions should be. . . . Maybe I simply lost my political idealism. . . . Maybe politics just got old. Maybe I just got tired,” he wrote.

In many ways, McKinnon merely reflects some of the undercurrents sweeping his industry. American University’s survey found that a majority of the professionals managing campaign operations admitted helping elect people they were later sorry to see in office.

And McKinnon wasn’t alone in losing his idealism. About 52% of consultants said political beliefs were their primary reason for getting into the business, but only 42% said it was their main motivation today. Meanwhile, the number saying profits were their main motive has risen, from 11% to 24%.

After leaving politics, McKinnon worked at Austin-based Public Strategies on ad campaigns for phone companies and backers of a new stadium in Tampa Bay, Fla. When he found himself invited to a social dinner with Bush in 1997, he walked in ready for a showdown.

“I had been drinking the Democratic Kool-Aid for years,” McKinnon said, repeating one of his favorite sound bites, “and I had my notions about him.” But the two hit it off--each had two daughters, each was a competitive runner--and became friends.

Soon afterward came the offer to join Bush’s 1998 gubernatorial reelection campaign as media advisor. In mulling over what previously had been unimaginable, McKinnon said he came to decide that an individual’s judgment is more critical than which party he calls home.

McKinnon said he was drawn to Bush’s willingness “to stand up, to stand in the wind” on issues such as immigration. As governor, Bush condemned GOP orthodoxy during the anti-immigrant era of then-California Gov. Pete Wilson, rejecting calls to reduce services to immigrants.

He declines to list the areas where they part ways but says that, when they differ concerning policy, “I salute and say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

McKinnon has gathered a media team including his former partner in Democratic politics, numbers wizard Matthew Dowd, longtime GOP consultant (and former writer for the TV show “Northern Exposure”) Stuart Stevens and a crew of Manhattan commercial ad designers that calls itself the “Park Avenue Posse.”

Together, they staff Maverick Media, the company McKinnon formed to produce the campaign ads. Maverick’s office is in a converted bomb shelter outside downtown Austin known as the Bunker. Black-and-white photos of its only client hang on walls painted blood red. Cans of “Bush’s Best” brand pinto beans sit atop wood crates and old ammunition boxes.

Despite the imagery of war in their office, McKinnon said he’d like to keep the tone of the fall campaign ads positive. But he is under no illusions.

“People react to fear more easily than they do hope,” he said.

Given his resume, some GOP insiders have carefully watched McKinnon’s ads, wondering if he had the stomach to attack his former party. So far, McKinnon’s spots have been more thematic than argumentative. They feature scenes from daily life--kids in school or an elderly man playing baseball--splicing in shots of Bush speaking and images of a racially diverse group of people standing against a white background.

He has rejected some of the sharper-edged negative ads written by his Madison Avenue team, including one in which the camera shows a series of bare flagpoles in an effort to suggest the Clinton White House has stripped the nation of its pride.

McKinnon insists, however, that he will “counterpunch” if the Democrats air ads blasting Bush.

Before he ever made a career of politics, McKinnon’s rebellion began with the usual first targets: his parents. The surgeon’s son who was raised in upper-middle-class Denver played in a band called Daybreak when he was a teen. His mother took a dim view of his quest for fame, but he caught the ear of singer Kris Kristofferson, who said he should try songwriting.

Caught Political Bug in College

After finishing his junior year in high school, McKinnon scribbled on the wall a note to his mother--”The anvil outlasts the hammer”--and caught a ride to the bus station. He wound up writing songs in Nashville, including one he said Elvis Presley planned to record before he died. He later returned to finish high school and eventually moved to Austin, drawn to its burgeoning live music scene. He won a contest for new songwriters in 1975 at Texas’ renowned Kerrville Folk Festival.

But after deciding he couldn’t cut it in the music industry (“The one time in my life when I really exercised some wisdom was when I recognized the limits of my talent musically,” he says), he enrolled at the University of Texas. Still drawn to writing, he became editor of the Daily Texan newspaper, where he penned editorials backing Democratic politicians and took a personal stand when police demanded he turn over unpublished photographs of an Iranian student protest. McKinnon refused and spent a day in jail.

After writing editorials backing one of his political heroes, Texas state Sen. Lloyd Doggett, McKinnon joined Doggett’s 1984 Senate campaign, where he worked with Begala and then-unknown consultant Carville, the team that went on to run Clinton’s campaign. Doggett won the primary but lost the general election. But McKinnon had caught the bug.

He was a spokesman for Gov. White and a campaign aide to Buddy Roemer, who was elected governor of Louisiana.

That began a run of bad luck. He returned to Texas in 1990 to work for the winning gubernatorial run of Richards but had a falling out with the campaign after the primary. In 1992, he wound up working for a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commissioner who, it turned out, had lied about her educational background. Meanwhile, he was turning down offers to work for Clinton’s presidential campaign--a decision he says was among the smartest he’s made because of what he views as the president’s lack of loyalty to his staff.

He wound up on the 1994 reelection effort of Texas Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, where McKinnon says he made some of the best ads of his career, including an unscripted spot featuring the candidate, sitting on a porch swing with his wife, talking to a just-off-camera McKinnon. But by 1996, he had had enough of politics.

“I lost my passion,” he said. “That’s what got me into it in the first place, and I didn’t think the flame could be rekindled. But it took George Bush to do that.”

Even as election day looms, he keeps life comfortable. He swims regularly and checks in at Club Deville, the Austin hipster hangout of which he is part owner.

If Bush wins in November, McKinnon said, he plans to remain in Austin with his wife and two daughters. He may dig out the half-finished songs he’s got stashed somewhere.

And if Bush loses?

“Same thing.”