Maverick rides again

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes, 'Awww!'"

The live-free philosophies of the beat generation, however, didn't always work for those who tried them. McKinnon's high hopes that summer and fall plummeted with the reality that he needed to finish high school. The anvil returned to the hammer in Denver for the second semester of his junior year.

After graduating from high school in 1972, he returned to Nashville. Then, in 1975, he won a contest for new songwriters at Texas' famed Kerrville Folk Festival. McKinnon decided to stay on in Austin, which was gaining a national reputation for live music.

He formed folk-rock bands with names he could get away with only in the 1970s: Goats of Arabia, Fork in the Road, and Lazlo Frink and the Odd Sofa Revue (featuring the Lazlettes). McKinnon was Lazlo Frink. His bands played to appreciative audiences but not to commercial success.

Realizing he was not going to become the next Paul Simon, or even Art Garfunkel, McKinnon enrolled at the University of Texas and started writing for the college newspaper, The Daily Texan. The student body elected him editor in 1980 in a campaign that served notice of McKinnon's political acumen. After McKinnon slipped some dirt about one opponent to a second opponent, the two foes engaged in a nasty battle. Meanwhile, the chaste McKinnon skated to victory.

It was a divisive time on campus and in the country. Americans were held hostage in Iran. At UT, Iranian students supportive of the Ayatollah Khomeini regime demonstrated against a speaker who expressed the pro-Shah view held by the United States.

The demonstration was mild, McKinnon recalls, but that did not stop the police from arresting the protesters or Travis County from prosecuting them as scapegoats of America's inability to flog Khomeini himself. During the students' trial, prosecutors called McKinnon as a witness. They demanded he release the film that a Daily Texan photographer had shot of the demonstration, hoping to use the pictures as evidence against the students. McKinnon refused, and the judge ordered him jailed for contempt of court. His lawyer pulled some strings so he would not have to spend a night behind bars, and the trial ended the next day.

The experience propelled McKinnon to folk-hero status among liberal college journalists across the country. He had thumbed his nose at the establishment at a time when America had started to embrace the conservative ideals of Ronald Reagan. As conservatism came into vogue along Greek Rows at UT and college campuses across the country, McKinnon was, in his words, "absolutely assaulting the fraternities." He adds, "In fact, some fraternity hung me in effigy. I was sort of an anarchist. I didn't believe in student government, fraternities -- I wanted absolutely no part of any of that."

Some years before, at Yale University, George W. Bush was president of his fraternity. The glib and confident son of a Republican congressman and grandson of a Republican U.S. senator, Bush represented everything that McKinnon abhorred.

Asked about the contrasts, McKinnon applies his current mind-set to allow him to recast his past.

"I think I would have liked him much in the same way I do now," he says. "It would have been a counterintuitive chemistry. I think we would have run into each other where he would have sort of said, 'Hmm, ex-musician,' and I would have said, 'Hmm, fraternity guy.' And our instincts would have been to not want to connect, and despite that instinct, we would have found we had a lot of characteristics in common."

It was late 1983. The Reagan Revolution was a rip-roaring success for conservatives; George H.W. Bush was a heartbeat away from the presidency.

And Mark McKinnon was drifting somewhat aimlessly, strumming his guitar only for fun, his hopes of a musical career having faded.

Then he wandered into the campaign office of Lloyd Doggett, a liberal Democratic state senator from Austin who was making an unlikely bid for the U.S. Senate. Doggett, a young, reform-minded legislator who wouldn't let lobbyists visit his Capitol office, impressed McKinnon. While at The Daily Texan, McKinnon wrote editorials praising Doggett for his courage. Doggett's campaign brought together Texas' young idealists.

One of those idealists was Lena Guerrero, who was running at the same time to represent Austin in the Texas House. She served in the House until Ann Richards appointed her to the Texas Railroad Commission in 1991. Her 1992 campaign to keep her job, however, went haywire when voters learned she had lied about being a college graduate.

Today Guerrero is a lobbyist commanding huge fees from corporate clients such as AT&T, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and Intel.

Like McKinnon, Guerrero has seen her political idealism go the way of her youth.