Maverick rides again

"If the question is whether Mark was a true believer in the mid-'80s, well, we all were," she says. "We were young and new to the political process to some extent. We had an 'us vs. them' attitude.

"I don't view the world that way anymore, and I'll bet you Mark doesn't either. Professionally, we've grown to understand that issues have two sides, that there are degrees and dimensions. We've grown up. I've arrived at the same conclusion Mark apparently has: that Republicans are not all evil any more than Republicans should think all Democrats are."

Back when McKinnon still believed Republicans were evil, he earned $5 an hour typing data into computers for Doggett's campaign. Then Paul Begala, who was UT student body president when McKinnon was Daily Texan editor, saw him. Begala, who directed Doggett's press office, plucked McKinnon from his clerical job to work for him. A hyperactive political consultant from Louisiana named James Carville managed the Doggett campaign.

Begala and Carville went on to become key Washington-based political consultants to President Bill Clinton and silver-tongued stars of the Sunday TV talk-show circuit.

Led by Carville, the team of young idealists -- Begala, McKinnon, and Guerrero -- helped Doggett pull off an exciting Democratic primary victory. But in the Reagan landslide of 1984, Phil Gramm trounced Doggett. McKinnon figured his career as a political hack was over as quickly as it had begun.

Politics being a career offering multiple lives, McKinnon received a call to work in the press office of then-Gov. Mark White, a Democrat. McKinnon was press secretary for White's unsuccessful re-election run in 1986.

During that campaign, McKinnon met Brian Rodgers, whose job was to schedule appearances for White's wife. Rodgers was fond of McKinnon, enjoying his dry sense of humor and respecting his introspective, unflappable nature. So when Rodgers, a die-hard Democrat, read in the newspaper last year that McKinnon had gone to work for Bush's gubernatorial re-election campaign, he couldn't believe it.

Rodgers remembered McKinnon as the principled hippie who was willing to go to jail rather than bow to the oppression of Iranian students. Rodgers had always thought he and McKinnon were cut from the same cloth. Rodgers quoted Noam Chomsky, and McKinnon quoted Jack Kerouac.

Rodgers still quotes Chomsky, and he would be happy to know that McKinnon still quotes Kerouac, although the On the Road quote doesn't hang over his desk as it did when he worked for White. A large framed photograph of George W. Bush and Bob Bullock has replaced it. Bush signed the matting in black felt pen: "Mark: You're the man."

Shortly after McKinnon signed on with Bush, Rodgers ran into his old friend at the downtown Austin YMCA. "I said to him, 'What are you doing? Don't you know his father was a murdering son of a bitch with the CIA?' And Mark said something like, 'Uh-huh, but his son's a really nice guy.'" (McKinnon says he remembers only Rodgers spouting off some wild conspiracy theory involving President Bush and the CIA.)

Rodgers was so discouraged by McKinnon's jump to the "dark side," as he calls it, that he felt he had to offset McKinnon's move.

While mowing his lawn one afternoon, Rodgers, 43, says, he contemplated the idea that what McKinnon sees purely as a career move could dramatically change the destiny of the earth. "I don't know if Bush knows anything about global warming, but I do know that Al Gore does. If Bush is elected president, Exxon could run this country's global-warming policy."

The owner of a smattering of small office warehouses and developer of a mobile-home park, Rodgers invested several thousand dollars of his earnings to lease a billboard along Interstate 35 in Austin, situated along a sight line of the state Capitol. On it, he advertised his World Wide Web site, www.georgebush2000.com.

The Web site is a storehouse of unflattering tidbits about Bush and his policies. Featured is a quote, supposedly uttered by former President Gerald Ford: "Candidates without ideas hiring consultants without convictions to run campaigns without content."

"I can't see someone like Mark McKinnon as an intolerant person, and I believe the Republican Party is intolerant," Rodgers says. "I'll grant you that maybe George W. Bush isn't that intolerant. He may even be endearing. But he comes from the Republican Party, the party of Trent Lott, and if they get into the White House and keep Congress, we will have a Republican-run government, and that's frightening to environmentalists, civil libertarians, consumers, and unions."

It should, Rodgers says, also be frightening to McKinnon -- at least to the guy he used to know. McKinnon says that guy doesn't exist anymore.

"I don't believe everything I did 10 years ago," McKinnon says. "I am a different human being. We're not stuck in time or place. I'll admit there was a time when I measured the number of positions in which I was aligned with a candidate. That's no longer the case. To me, it's more important where their heart is and that they have good judgment, loyalty, honesty, and integrity."