For McKinnon and Dowd, Living Strong and Living Gentle after Bush

WASHINGTON — They were converts who became true believers in the anointed son of a GOP patriarch.

One was in charge of spreading the word. The other, with evangelical zeal and polling know-how, helped target it.

Matthew and Mark: Apostles of George W. Bush, making history and a bit of money along the way.

But now, with Bush's story moving toward its final chapter and verse, longtime friends Matthew Dowd and Mark McKinnon, key advisers in the Bush presidential campaigns, are in different places heading in different directions. Each with criticisms of the presidency they helped create, each handling them differently.

Dowd very publicly criticizes Bush for what he calls "a lack of accountability."

"I thought we could change Washington and it became worse," he said.

McKinnon also acknowledges differences with Bush, but that's between him and his friend the president and are "not so serious that I don't think he was the best guy to be running the country." Though he won't publicly air these disagreements, McKinnon is known to have voiced them to the president on several major issues and decisions.

So, for now, McKinnon remains loyal to the Republicans as an unpaid adviser to GOP Sen. John McCain's presidential bid, an effort he says is more about helping "a guy who spent five years at the Hanoi Hilton" than a "burning desire to be in presidential politics, or any politics, anymore."

Though on board with McCain, McKinnon's eye is attracted back to the Democratic side, lured by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

And though Dowd has sworn off politicians, he says Obama is a 2008 candidate who intrigues him.

At the back end of this presidency, Dowd and McKinnon are former Democratic strategists who twice helped steer a Republican into the White House as part of a shared journey to divergent destinations.

On a recent mid-week day, both were about to hit the road in different directions.

"Going to key spots of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Judaism," Dowd said in an e-mail about an month-long trip that begins Monday. "India, Nepal, Istanbul, Israel, Rome. Birthplaces or key spots of all those. Also going to walk in footsteps of Gandhi and Christ and St. Francis, so going to Delhi and Galilee and Assisi."

McKinnon was headed to New Hampshire to walk in the footsteps of politicians.

Matthew

In June, near the eighth anniversary of Bush's formal entry into the 2000 presidential race and as the political world was deep into the 2008 race, here's some of what was on Dowd's mind as he worked on his 18-acre place on the Blanco River in Central Texas:

"I am putting a flag pole in (in the) next few weeks and have to do a bunch of weed-eating," he said in an e-mail.

Born in Detroit, Dowd is the third of 11 kids of a Chrysler marketing executive and his wife, both loyal, if not active, Republicans.

An internship for then-Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., led Dowd to several jobs with Texas Democrats, including the late Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and late Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock. Dowd also was a founding partner and president of Austin-based Public Strategies, where McKinnon still serves as vice chairman.

Through the link to Bullock, one of the first to speak of Bush as a possible president, Dowd wound up as director of media planning and polling in the 2000 campaign and chief consultant in 2004.

"He is a very sound thinker and has a good sense of how things will play out," Bush strategist Karl Rove said of Dowd during the 2004 campaign.

But Dowd now says his sense of how things would play out in the Bush presidency was wrong.

He went very public with his conclusions this year in The New York Times and on National Public Radio. The short version is Dowd is disappointed that Bush failed to create a more harmonious tone in Washington and that the administration has failed to "hold people accountable that have made mistakes and caused harm in the United States and the world."

"I think the Iraq war is a great example of an inability to admit a mistake and deal with the fact that it was a mistake," he said in an interview with Cox Newspapers. Dowd's oldest son, Daniel, an Army intelligence specialist fluent in Arabic, is scheduled for deployment to Iraq in the fall.

Dowd said he still considers the president a friend, adding: "I still like him personally. I don't have any personal animosity toward him or anybody else."

The White House reaction to Dowd's criticism has been talk of a "long personal journey."

In recent years, it's been a bumpy journey. His November 2005 divorce (his second) came three years after the death, in his arms, of a premature twin daughter. The other twin spent a year in the hospital before going home.

It's a life that has led Dowd to the upcoming trip as "my own sort of personal pilgrimage" toward a goal of "activating some gentleness in society."

"My trip is really a spiritual journey without an end goal in mind other than it came to me in a dream," he said.

And for Dowd, activating some gentleness includes swearing off politics, or, more precisely, politicians.

"I've come to the conclusion that if you (work for) a candidate there is always going to be a disappointment," he said. "If you do a cause you can't be disappointed in the cause."

Dowd, who recently bailed out of a term-limits effort in California, says his only political work now will be as chief strategist for the One Campaign against global poverty. The goal is to make sure those causes are major issues in the presidential race, said Dowd, whose hiring has not been formally announced by the organization.

"It keeps me in politics in a way that I like," said Dowd, who, at 46, says he's figured out this about life, and life after Bush.

"We believe in things. We trust something and sometimes it doesn't work out the way you thought and that trust is broken," he said. "The best way to say it is that it is painful. The best way to describe it is grief over a loss, which is a loss of a hope or a dream. We have these in life. And this was a fairly high-profile one."

"I don't regret it," he says of everything he did for Bush. "But I'm in a different place today than I was five or six years ago."

Mark

McKinnon's in a different place, too. And from it he can see Old Glory flapping atop the White House where his friend lives.

As he sits in his office at Public Strategies' Washington suite, is he disappointed in the Bush presidency?

"Sure," he said. "I think the president would say there are things that we wish he'd accomplished. But again, I think that there are a lot of external events that impose themselves that couldn't have been anticipated. So disappointment, sure."

In a most personal way, McKinnon got a good look at the more-than-disappointment some Americans felt about how Bush handled one of those external events. One of McKinnon's clearest indications about outrage over the administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina came from his daughter.

"She was there during the hurricane and when I picked her up from Tulane I got my own hurricane from my daughter about the administration and its response to Katrina," McKinnon said. "She blasted me."

The other major "external event" – the war – has McKinnon firmly sharing Bush's vision of Iraq as a "thriving democracy."

"I think it is going to be problematic for years, perhaps decades to come, but ultimately, yes, I do" see a thriving Iraqi democracy, McKinnon said.

Like Dowd, McKinnon's path to Bush began on the Democratic side, including a key role in the late Ann Richards' successful 1990 gubernatorial campaign.

"As I had a family and was paying taxes, like a lot of people, I just got more conservative as I grew older," he said.

McKinnon, again like Dowd, has been through personal challenges. His wife, Annie, had cancer. His father, Douglas McKinnon, a Denver plastic surgeon, died last month. And since the spring, the McKinnons have been dealing with the boating accident death of the boyfriend of one of his daughters.

And also like Dowd, McKinnon works on causes, through the Lance Armstrong Foundation and Bono's One Campaign effort.

On the business side, McKinnon was a major player, with Dowd and others, in a high-minded effort to create a Web site where political celebrities and plain old citizens could discuss the issues of the day. Hotsoup.com folded a few months after the launch. McKinnon now jokingly refers to hotsoup as "gazpacho," a cold soup.

Besides serving as vice chairman of Public Strategies, McKinnon is president of Maverick Media and is a Bush appointee on the Broadcasting Board of Governors. He also consults for McCain's underfunded, underdog candidacy, a stark contrast to the high-dollar Bush campaigns.

"Working for President Bush was like working for the Royal British Navy and working for McCain is like working for Pirates of the Caribbean," McKinnon said. "They're both a lot of fun and both completely different."

The commitment to McCain is tempered by an attraction to Obama.

"If the Democratic nominee is Barack Obama, I will not work in the general election. I will, however, still support and vote for John McCain. I just don't want to work against an Obama candidacy," McKinnon said.

An Obama presidency, he said, "would send a great message to the country and the world."

Could he vote for Obama against a Republican other than McCain? "Yeah, sure."

To some, the Obama link could look like the beginning of the completion of a circle for McKinnon, whose first political job was for Democrat Lloyd Doggett's unsuccessful 1984 U.S. Senate race.

But McKinnon rules out working for Obama.

"It's one thing to rat," he said of his cross-aisle conversion from Democrat to Republican. "It's another thing to re-rat."

So McKinnon remains loyal to a president who has disappointed him on some issues and a friend who has gone in a different direction.

Of the president: "George Bush has supported me and my family through some difficult times. He has been a good friend. I have no regrets. It's been a privilege and an honor to work for him."

Of Dowd: "I think he is just on a journey to figure out the big questions in life like we all are. He has just taken a different route."

The differences in their routes are symbolized by the Web sites with which they are associated. Through his Armstrong connection, McKinnon is actively involved in Livestrong.org.

Dowd, as if by counterpoint, is launching LiveGentle.com, with a preview page carrying this Gandhi quote: "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

"Livestrong, and obviously Lance, has been very successful," Dowd said. "That's a great thing. But for me a more important thing is living gentle."