Texas Monthly Talks

Mark McKinnon

Interview by Evan Smith

(Page 2 of 2)

That’s been happening all along, and it hasn’t hurt us so far. It’s all about 2000, about not forgiving John for perceived sins of long ago. The thing that’s frustrating is, he’d stack up against someone like Giuliani or Romney. He has a more conservative record.

Certainly on social issues.

Yeah. You know, the reason he has these problems is that he stood up on tough issues like immigration, campaign finance reform, the Gang of 14 [judicial confirmation] stuff. It actually worked! But it affected the party people, and they’re the vocal ones. That’s the problem.

The assumption has always been, Mark, that the evangelical wing of the party is crucial. If you don’t have that wing supporting you, you can’t win.

Oh, they’ll be with McCain in a heartbeat in the general election. It’ll take about 24 hours. If it’s McCain versus Hillary Clinton, they’ll back him enthusiastically.

Even someone like DeLay, who said that electing McCain would be the worst mistake that the Republicans could ever make?

I think Tom DeLay has very little influence.

You assume that Senator Clinton is going to be the nominee?

It looks probable at this point. It was a really dramatic comeback in New Hampshire, and there are some dynamics that put her in the driver’s seat. But like I’ve always said, I think [Barack] Obama would be a much better general election candidate for Democrats.

Because?

This is a change environment, and there’s nobody who represents change more than Obama. And hope. And I think he has a strong character and authenticity. And he doesn’t have the baggage of Hillary Clinton.

If this is a change election, tell me how a 71-year-old man whose real achievement from a foreign policy standpoint was forty years ago represents change.

Because he’s the guy who advocated for the greatest change of the last four years: the change in strategy in Iraq, the most important and most significant change in American policy. He’s been the guy who put Jack Abramoff in jail. He’s the guy who’s been fighting the lobbyists and the earmarks. He’s been the reformer. So, as he says, if he can do that as senator, imagine what he can do as president.

It’s one thing to be in the Senate and another thing to be in the White House. As president, he would have to contend with a largely Democratic—maybe a more Democratic—Congress. Aren’t they going to do everything they can not to cooperate with him?

I think McCain’s the one guy they would cooperate with.

Really?

Sure. You talk to Ted Kennedy. He’d tell you, “Shit, I’d work with the guy.” McCain’s the one who’s willing to work across the aisle. He works with [Joe] Lieberman, he works with Kennedy. He is not at all partisan in terms of governing.

What about the Chuck Norris argument, that McCain is too old to be president? Does the age issue concern you at all?

Given the way he’s campaigned, he’s shown he can outcampaign anybody twenty years younger. He does more events than anybody. He outhustles everybody. And he has a 95-year-old mother, so he has great chromosomes.

And his health is okay?

His health is terrific.

You had said at one point to Senator McCain—I assume you would still stick to this—that if it were he and Obama in a general election, you would stand down from working for his campaign.

I intend to be a man of my word.

Help me understand the differences between this campaign and previous campaigns. This is the third presidential race in a row that you will have worked on, and in those eight years a million things have changed. The media as it’s defined has changed, technology has changed, distribution platforms have changed.

Let me give you some insight into about how much has changed. In 2000 the Bush campaign did not even have BlackBerrys. Al Gore did, of course, because he invented the Internet. It’s actually because he had a BlackBerry that we had a recount, because as he was going up to give his concession speech, his aide got an e-mail on a BlackBerry and said, “Hold on.”

So it’s technology’s fault.

Flash-forward to 2004. The biggest technological change for us was that we could compress and move video data with the punch of a button, which meant I wasn’t having to FedEx half-inch tapes across the country to wherever the president or Karl Rove might be. I remember going to hotels and finding a TV with a VCR and then finding the president or Karl or somebody. It would literally take days to get approval. Now I could do it in minutes. And we could send video to six million supporters with the punch of a button, and instantly they’d have something they could see, feel, hear. This time the impact of technology is enormous. You almost never see paper press releases anymore; you do it through video with YouTube. There are no news cycles anymore; we’re pushing a lot of what we do through the Drudge Report or the Page [Mark Halperin’s blog on Time magazine’s Web site] or countless other new-media outlets. And we do a lot of Web ads that, to be honest with you, we don’t expect a lot of people to see, but the press sees them, and they drive the story of the day.

It’s not like you don’t play the mainstream media game, because, God knows, McCain has been on Meet the Press as much as anybody else. But from Jon Stewart on down, he’s also been savvy about feeding the alternative media.

Very much so. It’s a strategy that’s well tailored for McCain because he’s always enjoyed fringe press. He has an open and easy way about him—there’s nothing that he won’t talk about, so Stewart and those guys love him.

Do you think that’s one of the reasons that some people in the Republican party don’t like him—because he’s willing to play footsie with Jon Stewart?

Yeah, sure. They don’t trust the press. They don’t like the press. They think the press is liberal. So if the press likes somebody, it means he’s not conservative enough.

How much of a shadow does your old boss, the president, cast on this campaign? His name is barely mentioned in the Republican debates.

You don’t really hear the Republicans criticizing him.

A little bit.

Barely. He’s still very popular among Republicans, so if you don’t see people going out of their way to embrace him, they’re not going out of their way to dis him either.

How risky would it be to criticize the president at a time when his approval rating across the country is somewhere in the low thirties? Unless you say, “I’m running to do things differently,” aren’t you effectively running for his third term?

That’s where McCain gets points—for standing up and talking about how he criticized the strategy in Iraq early on.

But he also gets knocked for hugging George Bush at a time when people thought that he and Bush were very different people.

Yeah, although he’s always been a guy who goes out there and campaigns for Republicans and certainly for the president of his party. But I think the real issue here is that smart candidates, even the Democrats, understand that they can’t run a campaign like John Kerry did, which was all about Bush. I mean, this is page-turning time. All that’s in the past now.

How long before you yourself turn the page? Is this campaign it for you? Are you finally done in politics?

Yeah.

Should we take you at your word this time? I seem to remember a story you wrote for Texas Monthly in 1996 saying that you were out for good.

I don’t have a very good track record on this. There’s an instinct in me that’s doglike when cars go by. But my strong preference is to just do it from the sidelines.

Pages: 1 2