Word: mckinnons
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...sharpen their message, chief strategist Rove formed the McKinnon Commission to come up with a packaged policy that was not new in substance but had a buffed-up look to it, including sepia-toned briefing books. "Blueprint for the Middle Class," for instance, was just a 10-page document done in the style of actual blueprints that outlined how the Bush plan would support the family from cradle to grave. There was nothing subtle about it: on nearly every page was a picture of a woman, each one from a different walk of life, state, demographic subgroup. It looked like...
...Bush made his way to the stage, it was time for the music that marks the candidate's arrival. Mark McKinnon, Bush's media guru, sidled up to a reporter and said, "Listen to this." Instead of the usual song, a Van Halen number, the speakers in the hanger exploded with the sound of a different tune: Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow). Reporters started laughing when they heard it. Such a clever move, they said to each other, to play Clinton's campaign theme song at a Bush rally. In Arkansas! But suddenly, with...
...Down in Austin, Rove and polling analyst Matthew Dowd were in their adjacent offices, glued to their computers and telephones. "They were like mad scientists with those calculators," says media strategist Mark McKinnon. "They were punching them so hard and so fast it sounded like a machine gun." At various points one of them would shout that they were a thousand votes down or a thousand votes up. "We lived and died a thousand times tonight," said McKinnon. Spectators hovered outside Rove's office, looking in through a glass window. "We were all standing around like expectant fathers," says...
...vote cushion. His staff members knew Dade and Broward counties still hadn't reported, but their models told them they had a lead that was insurmountable. The margin would shrink, but then "it was just a matter of hanging on to the cliff by our fingers," remembers McKinnon. The problem is, "each finger kept getting stepped on." He and Ferguson nipped out for a little tequila to calm their nerves. Rove, who was wearing his phone headset all evening, was calling a statistics professor in Texas for his analysis of how the numbers were running, and then yelling...
...networks gift-wrapped Florida once more and this time handed it to Bush. "Everyone went insane, screaming and crying," McKinnon says. Virtually the entire staff in the headquarters left the building, forming a dance line up Congress Avenue along the eight blocks to the celebration site. The colored lights were flashing on the capitol; it's a miracle no one was electrocuted in the sweeping rain. At the rally the television screens switched to a video of Bush on the trail, at home and on the ranch, all to the tune of Signed, Sealed, Delivered...