Short Cuts: Episode V 
The Spin Doctor Is Out
As a political consultant, I learned the tricks of the trade from James Carville and Paul Begala. I loved playing hardball in a business where winning is everything. But the time came when politics got too partisan, too mean, and too all-consuming—even for me. by Mark McKinnon
(Page 3 of 3)
I expected to stay with Sawyer indefinitely, but two things happened back in Texas: Roy Spence turned his attention away from politics, and Ann Richards decided to get into the 1990 governor’s race. Spence, a founder of GSD&M advertising in Austin, was the preeminent Democratic media consultant in the Southwest. He had been Walter Mondale’s presidential media consultant in 1984 and worked on campaigns in Texas for Mark White, Garry Mauro, and Bob Krueger. But Spence began spending more and more time on commercial advertising and less on politics. So when I was asked to serve as the communications director for Ann Richards’ primary campaign for governor, it seemed like the right opportunity to work my way back into Texas politics. At the same time, I joined a small Austin consulting firm that worked for a number of clients in statewide and congressional races across the South during the 1990 political cycle.
One of Richards’ initial problems was that she wasn’t prepared for dealing with the media in a campaign atmosphere. She was used to being the darling of the political press corps. She was friends with many members and had shared a lot of long afternoons and late nights with them. But the moment she became a candidate, the stakes went up and the game changed.
One of my first assignments was to establish a good working relationship with the reporters who would be covering the race. I knew that for raising money, it is important how Washington views a candidate. One person whose opinion would be influential in establishing the conventional wisdom on the race was David Maraniss, the Washington Post’s regional bureau chief in Austin. Early in the race, I invited him to lunch with Richards. Big mistake.
The lunch was billed as informal—an opportunity for Maraniss to get to know Richards. Richards, however, was extremely apprehensive about the encounter. I was constantly surprised how little confidence she had in herself; I believe she knew what great expectations people had for her, and she worried that she would not measure up. Regarding Maraniss, she feared that he would want to get into a deeply substantive dialogue for which she felt unprepared so early in the race. I assured her that was not the idea.
Trouble hit during salad. After some initial friendly chat, Maraniss pulled out his notebook, and I saw Richards stiffen like deer hearing a hunter. Maraniss asked quite innocently, “So, what do you expect the basic ideas or themes of your campaign to be?”
Richards’ fork dropped and clattered onto her plate. She rearranged her napkin in her lap. She turned from Maraniss to me and, colder than an iceberg, said, “Mark, I thought I wasn’t going to have to work for my lunch.” And that, of course, made it into the Post’s story: When asked about her campaign theme, Richards said that she thought she wasn’t going to have to work for her lunch.
Ann Richards won her race because she is a survivor. And that is a high compliment in politics today. You must be willing and able to take an absolutely brutal and humiliating public beating and return fire. During the governor’s race, Richards got dragged down into the depths of political hell and then got pulled back up to heaven on her determined old water-skis behind the motor mouth of Clayton Williams. Election night in November 1992 was a great night. It was also a huge professional success. My firm’s clients won fourteen out of seventeen races that night.
And then things just took off. Campaigns and Elections magazine called me a “rising star.” Candidates started calling me for a change. Bob Lanier called. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called. A candidate for president of Nigeria called—and I went off to Africa. Then, in 1991, I hooked up with Public Strategies, a well-established Austin firm of political professionals with a long history of success.
By this time I had come to view political candidates in two ways. There were those who had fun and didn’t take themselves too seriously (Dallas mayor Ron Kirk is a good example). And then there were the Bob Kruegers of the political world who took themselves very seriously—and had very little fun. I was with Krueger on his first day in the U.S. Senate after being appointed by Ann Richards. A Dallas television reporter asked him if, when he had been a college professor at Duke in the early seventies, he could have imagined himself today, serving in the Senate. Krueger didn’t even pause. “Why, yes,” he intoned. “I’ve always assumed this is where I was meant to be.”
Well, he wasn’t meant to be there for long. Richards had named him to fill Lloyd Bentsen’s seat after Henry Cisneros, John Sharp, and a long list of others fell out of the running. Nobody really disliked Krueger, but he was hardly the choice to inspire Democrats to vote in a special election. After he went into a runoff trailing Kay Bailey Hutchison, our media team—Roy Spence, Paul Begala, and I—were reduced to putting Krueger in a leather jacket and sunglasses as a spoof to demonstrate just how bad a “politician” he really was. The so-called “Terminator” ad got a lot of criticism because shortly after it aired, a poll was released that showed Krueger down 20 points to Hutch-ison. What none of us could say was that he was down 30 points before the ad.
My next disaster was Lena Guerrero’s race for railroad commissioner in 1992. I knew Lena from UT and thought of her as a skilled and shrewd politician with a terrific future. Lena had been an Austin state representative and had played a prominent role in the Richards’ campaign. When a vacancy occurred at the Texas Railroad Commission, Richards appointed Guerrero to the position. When she came up for election, she asked me to help. But I made the number one mistake in political consulting: an assumption.
In any serious campaign in America today, one of the most important jobs is what we call opposition research. You hire specialists to research every possible facet of your opponent’s life and career. But it is just as important to conduct aggressive opposition research on your own candidate. Candidates always sound convincing and truthful when they answer “Nothing” to the question, Are there any dark secrets we ought to know about before we get started? But you shouldn’t take it for granted.
In the case of Guerrero, I assumed our opposition researchers had taken the basic step of looking into her résumé. But early in September I got one of those phone messages any political consultant dreads. A campaign operative delivered the bad news. “Uh, Mark, we just got a call from a reporter who has some questions about Lena’s degree, like whether or not she actually has one.”
The campaign self-destructed before our eyes. Lena’s initial denials only served to make the story worse and give it legs. The story led TV news reports across Texas for about three weeks. First there was the question of whether she had her degree. Then it was a question of whether, as she said, she was just four hours short. Then it came out that she was nineteen hours short. Then came the videotapes of Lena giving a speech at a commencement ceremony: “I remember my own graduation.” The election was effectively over.
Fortunately, there were more than enough successes to make up for the occasional disaster. But as each campaign cycle came to an end, I found myself thinking more and more about getting out of politics. I still loved the heat of the fight and the thrill of victory. But the highs were getting tougher to sustain and the lows tougher to pull out of. Campaigns are 100 percent pursuits. They don’t stop at night or on weekends. That doesn’t leave much time for things like family. (Carville just had his first child at 51.) My daughters will soon be teenagers, and we have too few memories to share. This was brought home to me when they and my wife were looking through some old photographs of our place in New York and my eldest inquired earnestly, “Mommy, did Daddy live with us then?”
Beyond family considerations, the bitter partisanship of today’s politics has become increasingly frustrating to me. I have seen too many good people driven out of and away from politics because they didn’t want to go through the public radiation treatment that occurs in a highly charged partisan campaign. Political consultants are partly responsible for creating that atmosphere. At the same time, our firm has grown to almost one hundred employees, including a number of Republicans, and as we have expanded our business into corporate political communications, participation in partisan elections is more and more of a practical problem.
I’ll never leave politics entirely. I am still working in public affairs and on nonpartisan campaigns, and I employ the same strategy and tactics on behalf of our clients. I still believe in the best aspects of politics—the process of bringing opposing factions together for a common purpose—and in people of vision and character who can make it work. People like Bob Bullock and Bob Lanier are public servants in the truest sense of the word; they serve because they are committed to public policy and making life better for the people of their state and communities. They understand power and how to use it, but they use it to the right end. They are not partisans, and they don’t practice the politics of division. I’d do their laundry if asked.
But I won’t miss desperate candidates, manic campaign managers, and last-minute attack and response ads. This year I will not be spending the frantic last weekend before the election in a dark editing studio. I’ll be deep in the interior of Mexico, following the migration of the monarch butterfly—with my family.
My Library
