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Born in Colorado, he ran away from home just before his senior year in high school to get to Nashville, Tenn., and Kris Kristofferson, who had been impressed by a band fronted by McKinnon.

“Kristofferson sort of put up with me, and I just hung out with him and hung out at the studio and wrote songs,” McKinnon said. “Then I decided I was going to spend the rest of my life trying to be Bob Dylan or Kris Kristofferson.”

McKinnon later returned to Denver and completed high school before heading back to Nashville to pursue the musical dream, complete with dishwashing for dollars.

“I wrote a bunch of songs. I had songs cut by, like, the Miss Mississippi 1964 beauty queen. It entered and left the charts at 160,” he said. “There was a song that Elvis was going to cut and then he died the next week.”

Music brought McKinnon to Texas when he won a songwriting contest at the 1975 Kerrville Folk Festival. A year later, he moved to Austin and lived off gigs at a variety of now-defunct venues.

Eventually, his intellectual clock ticking, McKinnon decided to check out the local big state university. He enrolled at the University of Texas and became editor of The Daily Texan.

When prosecutors looked for Iranian students who had disrupted a campus speech by a Shah ally, they asked McKinnon to turn over unpublished photos. He refused, and spent a day in jail until the case moved forward without the photos.

Apropos for McKinnon’s long, strange trip, the prosecutor who had him jailed is now a neighbor.

“I see him and wave at him all the time across the street,” McKinnon said. “I bet he still doesn’t know why he has a flat tire every morning.”

With a UT education, if not a degree, under his belt, McKinnon moved to politics.

The first stop was a house that served as headquarters for then- Texas state Sen. Lloyd Doggett’s 1984 U.S. Senate race. Inside, McKinnon encountered some folks heading for the big time. Cajun James Carville was the campaign manager and Paul Begala was a top hand. Both later hit the big time after signing on with then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.

“I love the rascal like a wayward stepchild,” Begala said of McKinnon.

Begala believes Bush may be McKinnon’s little red sports car. “As a friend, I think maybe it’s a bit of a midlife crisis,” he said of McKinnon’s current job.

For McKinnon, the Doggett campaign led to a stint as a press aide to Democratic Texas Gov. Mark White and a string of Democratic candidates, including Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer and Texas Gov. Ann Richards.

After the 1987 Roemer win, McKinnon moved to New York to work with political media mogul David Sawyer’s firm. He returned to Austin in 1990 and became communications director for Richards’ bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. He left after Richards won the primary, moving on to 17 other clients he had across the nation.

By 1996, McKinnon, whose operation was folded in with Public Strategies, an Austin-based consulting firm, was very good at what he did and very unhappy about it.

“I’d learned how to manipulate the system, and I used all the tricks of the trade to help elect my candidates,” he wrote in Texas Monthly. “There’s a bottom line to political consulting: winning. Nothing else matters.”

McKinnon went corporate, concentrating his talents on Public Strategies’ non-political clients.

“Life was good,” he said of not dealing with candidates.

Life was so good that McKinnon was doing things like dining with his Public Strategies cronies and Bush in the fall of 1997. From afar, McKinnon was intrigued by Bush.

“He was a Republican governor who was for things instead of against everything,” he said. Nevertheless, McKinnon headed to the dinner “prepared not to like him.” He failed.

“I was disarmed almost instantaneously by his humanity, by his integrity. I expected to meet a great politician. I just was unprepared to meet such a great human being,” he recalled.

Eventually, McKinnon was approached to do the ads for Bush’s 1998 re-election campaign. His coming-out party came at the GOP state convention in June 1998. McKinnon strolled into the Tarrant County Convention Center, surveyed the crowd and joked about needing a flak jacket.

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