In the end, McKinnon says, he decided to work for Bush “out of respect, loyalty and friendship — which as you know are qualities that are very important to the Bush culture.” Those feelings were reciprocated by Bush, who put McKinnon in charge of two of the most well financed media operations in history.
The strategies McKinnon employed in the past decade may seem awfully negative for a man who says, “Negativity drove me out of politics in the mid-Nineties.” (After all, McKinnon was the architect of the ads that trashed John McCain in South Carolina and beyond in 2000, ensuring a Bush nomination.) But McKinnon says it isn’t so.
“It’s not negative to define John Kerry. We’re not doing attack ads, we’re doing strong contrast ads,” he told me four year ago. “That’s legitimate, not negative. We aren’t saying Kerry is ‘Weak on Defense,’ we’re saying he’s ‘Wrong on Defense.’ There’s a big difference.”
As I wrote at the time, “The war of words matters a lot, and while McKinnon concedes that the Bush campaign is busy testing them in focus groups, he offers no details. Still, it’s clear he is attempting to position the president as a ’steady’ leader and Kerry as a ‘flip-flopper’ who changes positions often for political expediency. If the words work, they will be repeated over and over as part of that ‘coordinated blitz’ aimed at defining Kerry as ‘indecisive and lacking conviction.’”
Despite the fierce hatred he has engendered in some of his former friends, McKinnon generally remains an approachable and affable figure. Even Begala – who eventually did become student body president by winning a runoff between the “two top humans” after Hank the Hallucination was gunned down — extols him. “I love him!” Begala told me. “He’s a wonderful, terrific guy.”
Even though he went over to the Dark Side?
“It’s a free country. Sure, he was way to the left of me in college, and now he’s way to the right,” Begala responded. “But hey — James Carville goes home every night and goes to bed with Mary Matalin… Mark has changed his life, but I don’t believe he had a conservative epiphany.
“I believe him when he says this is based on a deep and personal love of George Bush. But this is not a race for student government president,” Begala concluded. “Still, if Bush is ruining the country, I say let’s attack the organ grinder and not the monkey.”
“I haven’t taken as many shots as I thought I would,” McKinnon conceded at the time. “Probably because Begala blessed me.”
Would he describe himself as a Republican?
“Let’s just say I’m a man of evolution,” he responded with a grin.
His many critics now contend that, far from “evolving,” McKinnon is just an opportunistic turncoat, a lustful chameleon, a bizarre sellout… and worse. In any event, now it’s time for another hallucinatory campaign, and McKinnon is once again in the thick of it.
Just ask John McCain—or Barack Obama, for that matter!
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