Yesterday, former Texas political campaign operative and George W. Bush media advisor Mark McKinnon shared his prediction for the results of today’s presidential election and concerns about the American political system. Today he traces his political evolution, talks about the practical solutions to end gridlock in Congress being developed by No Labels, the organization he founded, agrees that a bold truth teller could have huge electoral appeal, and gives his take on the generation he is teaching.
Austin Post: It must be rather satisfying as a University of Texas dropout to now be teaching at Harvard University.
Mark McKinnon: It is. I’m a visiting fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard. What makes it even more interesting is that I didn’t graduate from UT, I only attended. This is my third time teaching at Harvard. When I first went through the drill to get qualified to come here and the interview process and then I guess they vote on it, I got in and then I got called by some bureaucrat administrator months later saying, I understand you’re coming to Harvard and I’m just doing all the final paperwork and I notice that we don’t have a copy of your diploma. I said, well, that’s because I don’t have one. There’s was a stony silence at the end of the call and I knew what he was thinking: Oh my God we let one through. But it was too late.
Austin Post: One of my least favorite sayings about political leanings is the Churchill line about how, to paraphrase, a young man who is not liberal has no heart and an old man who is not conservative has no mind. But I suspect that doesn’t apply so much in your case. And wasn’t your conversion to becoming a Republican also in some ways due to the personal relationship you developed with then Governor Bush?
Mark McKinnon: Yeah. It was in part an evolution too. Texas was for years a two-party state, but the two parties were Democrat and conservative Democrat. George Bush came along and I was urged to meet and work with him by the epic Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock [a Democrat], who loved George Bush and was a big mentor to him and together they worked hand in hand in a really bipartisan fashion. The things that attracted me to the then-Governor Bush were issues like immigration reform and education reform – issues that the Republicans had not traditionally talked about at all.
Austin Post: You’ve certainly had one of the most unique careers in the political consulting field by working both sides of the aisle.
Mark McKinnon: I’ve had very unusual arc, none of it by design. I started off as a musician, but always kind of liked politics. So when I realized at one point, tracking my music arc – I was really dedicated to that and thought that’s all I would do in my life; I looked around at all these great musicians around me who were a lot better than I was – I realized that by the time I was 50 I was going to be the second act at the Pflugerville Holiday Inn. So I decided to go to Plan B and went to U.T. and got into journalism and liked to write about politics. And then went to work for the Lloyd Doggett campaign in 1984 and got the bug and loved doing campaigns. And then got the media side of it bug that I really loved and that kinda married up my creative interests and my political side. So that’s what I did for 30 years. I spent 15 years of that working as a Democrat and 15 years as a Republican.
I came to the conclusion that, a) there are good people on both sides of the aisle. And, b) that both sides were pretty screwed up. And increasingly so in recent years. And for reasons we could spend hours talking about, we have a highly polarized hyper-partisan environment that rewards bad behavior and punishes good behavior or what I’d call bipartisan or just cooperative behavior. And so I rededicated myself to trying to establish a more civil dialog and bipartisanship, because I’ve always been kind of a man in the middle either just to the left side or right side of the line. I had to pick one or the other because it was the only two choices we had.
When I get outside of Washington and I’m in Austin or Colorado and talk to my friends and family, they may identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats, but most of them are not radical hyper-partisans and realize that the parties need to work together in order to achieve some consensus and move things forward. That represents easily more than half the country, I think, anecdotally and from a research perspective, I’ve discovered. And so people look at Washington and say, what the hell’s going on up there? That doesn’t seem to reflect my community or the people I know. The reason for that, again, involves a longer discussion that has to do with the way the system has now evolved where you have enormous sums of special interest money, often undisclosed and anonymous, supporting highly partisan interests that are really minority constituencies, but they have huge microphones and big amplifiers. So it’s distorted and gives you the impression that they reflect these huge constituencies, which they don’t.
Austin Post: If Obama wins today, as you believe he will, isn’t it likely that Washington will still be gripped by partisan gridlock?
Mark McKinnon: Yes, I do. It’s not a particularly optimistic picture, although we are doing some things at No Labels to create what we’re calling a problem-solvers caucus of 40 members that will announce in January. I think we’ll be a critical factor and do what the blue dog Democrats did before they were decimated, and Main Street Republicans did before they were decimated, and be a catalyst for the leadership to go and cut deals on big issues. So I think that’s going to be a very constructive pivotal group that can help make some progress.
If Obama is reelected, I hope that he’ll take the opportunity – since he now doesn’t have to worry about getting reelected – to really try to go big and do some big things. As somebody who has great concerns about money and politics and the impact of Citizens United on the political ecosystem, I’ll be comforted by the notion that any Supreme Court nominees over the next four years will be people who will probably be inclined to overturn that decision.
It’s messy but it’s still the best system in the world and we’ll struggle our way through it. I’m still a glass-half-full guy at the end of the day.
Austin Post: One of the goals of No Labels is suggesting how to again “Make Congress Work.” But given your concern about the corrosive effect of money in politics I’m surprised that there isn’t anything about, say, lobbying within that.
Mark McKinnon: There’s also nothing in there about a lot of other things like campaign finance reform and redistricting that we support and think needs to be addressed. Let me just tell you about the evolution of No Labels. I’ve been involved in a number of different efforts in this space. When we started No Labels a couple of years ago, the initial idea was that it would be what would be what I describe as a broad centrist group, which is sometimes called moderate and sometimes called progressive. And we would represent those interests in the middle of the American spectrum. But then we quickly discovered that that is a very slippery slope and that people have very divergent ideas about what centrism means. And it got really unproductive really quickly, and we realized that we would never achieve any consensus about what we were going to do or where we were going to go.
So then we decided, let’s tackle some of the issues you mentioned like lobbying and campaign finance reform or redistricting. And then we realized that there were other groups already doing that. We wanted to find a place where we could make a unique contribution. We didn’t just want to throw rocks over the wall but to try and work in a way that would be a catalyst for change. So we began doing a lot of research with chiefs of staff and legislative aides and members of Congress looking at what I describe as process reforms. In other words, these weren’t big ideological issues like immigration or the fiscal cliff or energy, but they were issues that grease the wheels and put some oil in the engine so the motor could start running again.
Austin Post: Cleaning up some of the strange and arcane procedures and rules that govern the workings of Congress?
Mark McKinnon: Exactly. Things that over time have made it really difficult for Congress to just do the basic work it’s supposed to do. So we came out with two different plans: One is called “Make Congress Work” and the other is called “Make the Presidency Work” that have a lot of what I feel are really good ideas that are starting to get a lot of attention, like “No Budget, No Pay.” If you don’t do your job you don’t get paid. And budget is policy. Budget frameworks create policy. You have a situation right now where the Senate hasn’t passed a budget in three years. They just keep kicking it down the road with continuing resolutions and Band-Aids. And so that means that the policy keeps getting kicked down the road and the problems get worse and worse. So we like this idea where if you don’t put a budget out in time for each day you get docked your pay. That already has tremendous support and a hundred co-sponsors in the House and Senate. And there are a lot of people running on that platform. So we think that has a real chance of getting attention and passage in the next session.
Or “Up or Down Vote on Presidential Appointments Within 90 Days.” There are hundreds of jobs in Washington that don’t get filled. I got appointed by President Bush to the Broadcasting Board of Governors and didn’t get confirmed for three years. And that was just because some Democrat didn’t get appointed so they wanted to hold up a Republican appointment. And that was me. It was this Hatfield and McCoys kind of thing: No one can remember how the fight got started but they had to fight. The President should be able to fill the jobs so they can do the work. Tim Geithner was over there at Treasury trying to deal with fiscal meltdown with a bunch of secretaries and interns because they could get appointments through.
Austin Post: Given how political campaigns have gone from spin and stretching the truth to outright lies, I’ve felt for some time that if a “Bullworth” style candidate came along to run for national office who says I drank this, snorted that, took the money and was found in bed with both a dead hooker and a live boy, so let’s now get past that and talk about what really matters, they’d win by a landslide. What do you think about that?
MM: Oh God, man! You’re talking my talk. I was literally talking with someone about “Bullworth” last night. I was saying that I’d love for it to happen politically, but was also thinking what an interesting screenplay it would be to do basically a “Bullworth” version but have the main character be like Allen Simpson – kind of a wacky old guy who tells it like it is.
Austin Post: My screenplay like that would be Bernie Sanders.
Mark McKinnon: I just think that if someone came along like that, a truth teller, it would just light up the boards, I really do. That’s why I was so excited about that Americans Elect idea. Another guy who was really good on that score was Buddy Roemer. He’s a guy who could appeal to a guy like me but also a guy like you – a Republican who supported Occupy and breaking up the big banks.
Austin Post: How did you come to land in Texas and specifically Austin?
Mark McKinnon: Growing up in Colorado, I grew up hating Texas. Colorado has that weird anti-Texas thing. I thought I’d live in Tehran before I’d live in Texas. But I got in the music business. I ran away from home in the middle of high school and hitchhiked to Nashville and lived there for four or five years and then I came out to play the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1975….
Austin Post: Where you were a winner in the New Folk competition….
Mark McKinnon: That’s right. On my way back to Nashville to Kerrville I stopped in Austin and fell in love instantly. There was no live music in Nashville at the time. I was talking to someone from Austin and they were complaining there were only 87 clubs and 110 bands and I said, “Make it 111. I’m on my way.”
Austin Post: Is there any musical artist who is really floating your boat these days?
Mark McKinnon: I have discovered this great musician up here who has become my favorite musician of all time. His name is Tim Gearan. He’s just phenomenal. He’s very much like Colin Hay if you like that sort of thing, and he’s got this local all-star band. He’s kind of Boston’s version of Bob Schneider – a guy who’s phenomenally talented but hasn’t really broken out of Boston.
Austin Post: Can you summarize the influence Austin has had on your political perspective?
Mark McKinnon: Austin is an open, progressive and tolerant city. No matter where I’ve been on the political spectrum, I’ve always been all of those things. I continue to believe that Austin’s the greatest place in America.
Austin Post: What’s the future hold for you?
Mark McKinnon: I’m trying to downshift. I’m enjoying writing. And teaching. That and No Labels is kind of where my focus is these days.
Austin Post: When you say writing, would that include a book?
Mark McKinnon: I’ve had a lot of conversations about that. I’m just not sure…. Yeah, it’s something I’ve thought about. I’m just not sure that I’ve found a topic that would really be of broad interest. What I would write about is probably in some vein my view of where politics has been and where it might go and the No Labels approach. But I know in the publishing world that those are the kind of books that just die a very quick death.
Austin Post: At Harvard you are dealing with the next generation of the best and the brightest who have an interest in politics. What's your assessment of them?
Mark McKinnon: I’m very impressed with this generation. One thing I have noticed is that they seem to be less interested in and motivated to pursue partisan politics in general. They seem more apt to focus on a single issue or a couple of issues and get very knowledgeable and committed. They strike me as very articulate and passionate about the causes they choose to pursue. Being the glass-half-full kind of guy I am, they give me a lot of hope for the future.
Austin Post: Have you ever considered running yourself for political office?
Mark McKinnon: The only thing I’d run for is the border.
