LOCKHART, Tex. - In John McCain's remarkably superstitious campaign, where at crucial moments coins and weather and sides of the bed are all accounted for, there may be nothing that carries the talismanic power of media adviser Mark McKinnon's hat.
The black felt cowboy hat began as the crowning accessory to a McKinnon cowboy-bohemian ensemble that usually includes a vinyl jacket embroidered with the McCain campaign logo, Wrangler jeans, black leather man-purse, and a multicolor scarf flung around his neck. But when Cindy McCain, the candidate's wife, noticed that McKinnon had worn the same hat on the nights when he had prepped McCain for a strong debate performance and when the campaign carried New Hampshire, she proclaimed it "lucky." From then on, when McKinnon was unable to attend key events, the hat traveled on without him and other aides took turns wearing it.
"It's taken a pretty good beating," McKinnon said. "It's lost its shape."
McKinnon's luck may run out Tuesday, when primaries in four states could settle the nomination battles in both parties. A political consultant who prides himself on working only for candidates he genuinely likes may find himself torn between two of them, and left to choose between loyalty and conscience in a profession that has never much prized either.
A year ago, when McKinnon went to work for McCain, he wrote the campaign a memo saying that if the Arizona senator were to face Democrat Barack Obama - whom McKinnon has met and regards highly - in the general election, he would step down from his job.
"You can already see the shape of the general election," McKinnon said recently over a plate of barbecued brisket at a restaurant in Lockhart, discussing an ongoing exchange of attacks between the two candidates.
In recent remarks drafted by speechwriter Mark Salter, McCain lampooned Obama, though not by name, for believing that "history has anointed me to save my country in its hour of need."
"It's already heading in that direction, and I've become increasingly uncomfortable," said McKinnon, who had come to the self-described "barbecue capital of Texas," just south of his home in Austin, to seek out a hat store he hoped could add a contrasting trim to the brim of an almond-colored Stetson.
As a boy in Colorado, McKinnon, 52, recalled, "there's not a picture of me growing up where I'm not wearing a hat." He started playing guitar and writing songs in seventh grade, and by the time he turned 16, his band, Daybreak, had caught the attention of Kris Kristofferson, who brought them into a studio to make a record. McKinnon dropped out of school, hitchhiked to Nashville, moved into Kristofferson's apartment, and became one of his full-time songwriters.
McKinnon won the songwriter's competition at the 1975 Kerrville Folk Festival for "Thanks to You, Thanks A Lot," and moved to Texas to start a performing career. But after a few years of playing shows around Austin, McKinnon said: "I recognized the limits of my musical ability. I thought, 'I'm going to end up at the Lockhart Holiday Inn as the second act when I'm 50 years old.' "
So McKinnon enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, where he locked his guitar in a closet to focus on his studies, but got lured into campus politics as an "anarchist journalist" editing the student newspaper. After graduating, McKinnon went to work for a US Senate candidate in Texas in 1984, the first in a series of Democratic campaigns that would eventually send him to New York, where he joined the advertising team advising Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race.
In the years after Dukakis's loss, McKinnon joined Public Strategies Inc., a consulting firm with a roster of corporate clients. As he raised a family, he said his personal views moved rightward on taxes, trade, and national defense. By the mid-1990s, McKinnon began to consider himself a "moderate Republican."
McKinnon continued to do political work on the side, but the clients he liked most were not those he agreed with as much as those he believed in.
"Over time, I came to realize that just because somebody met an ideological litmus test didn't necessarily mean they were good officeholders or good people," McKinnon said in the interview, prizing instead "character, life experience, the ability to make good decisions, resist special interests."
"There's got to be a chemistry," he said.
But the occupation's changing economics - which pushed him to take on 10 campaigns each year - made it difficult for him to be so picky.
Then McKinnon met George W. Bush, who needed a media consultant for his 1998 gubernatorial reelection in Texas and a likely presidential run two years later. McKinnon, who said he saw Bush as a "progovernment Republican," fell quickly for the man, who he said "had real humanity about him, a real decency," and helped him win the presidency twice as his main media adviser.
In 1997, McKinnon created a firm to handle his work for Bush and called it Maverick Media. But by 2000, it was McCain who was fashioning himself as the party's "maverick" against Bush's establishment powerhouse. McKinnon said he became a "fan" of McCain's at the time, and that some of the attacks by Bush surrogates against their opponent "bothered the hell out of me," he recalled. "There was a lot of tension between the Bush and McCain worlds, and I never had that tension."
When they met during Bush's reelection campaign in 2004, McCain and McKinnon quickly bonded when McKinnon rolled up his sleeve to show McCain the "40" tattooed on his arm - the jersey number of Pat Tillman, an Arizona Cardinals football star who was killed by friendly fire while serving as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan.
After Bush's reelection bid, McKinnon said he "had no desire to be at the wheel of a presidential campaign" again. But for McCain, he volunteered to assemble a team of other top media consultants whom he would occasionally advise. Last summer, however, McCain's campaign was in disarray and unable to afford the consultants.
"When we had the meltdown, they all quit," said McKinnon. "Then it was just me and the interns left."
Like a number of McCain aides, McKinnon agreed to work for free and produced all of the campaign's ads at cost, often in collaboration with Salter and Justin Germany, the campaign's videographer. They turned out a Christmas-themed spot that McKinnon considers one of McCain's most successful for only $1,800 in footage and editing fees. A biographical video shown at the beginning of some of McCain's rallies cost one-twentieth as much as a comparable video McKinnon had made for Bush.
As McCain's comeback picked up speed, McKinnon cast jealous glances toward Obama, who was the beneficiary of two unconventional, online videos that McKinnon considers the best work of the campaign: an early bootleg spoof of Apple's "1984" ad lampooning Hillary Clinton as "Big Brother" and a music video released in January by singer will.i.am featuring celebrities saying excerpts from an Obama speech.
McKinnon becomes visibly giddy when discussing the video, calling it "cool" and "really powerful stuff."
"I'm a music guy," said McKinnon. "You combine music and politics, I'm halfway there."
McKinnon approaches both with a fan's enthusiasm. He said he has not picked up a guitar in more than a decade, but he spends his late-night off-hours writing dispatches that he sends to his "Music Caucus" list, including hundreds of political insiders.
Three days before Super Tuesday, McKinnon released his list of the "111 wussiest songs of all-time." Number 47: "Puppy Love" by Donny Osmond ("if only he'd waited to hit puberty before branching out from the family act"). Number 19: Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting" (a "mopey ballad which still pops up just when we think it's safe to get our teeth cleaned").
McKinnon has begun adjusting to the likelihood - which seemed unimaginable when word of his pledge to pull out if Obama and McCain squared off in the general election first leaked last summer - that he may soon be forced to transition from participant to spectator in the political world, as well.
Having read Obama's first memoir, he was already drawn to the Illinois senator when they first met at a Washington dinner party in late 2006. "I think he has a history and hopefully a potential," said McKinnon. "That's what I like about him, that's what I liked about Bush."
After Obama announced his candidacy a year ago, McKinnon concluded he would be unable to adopt the "hard focus" and "aggressive posture you'd need to take" against him as a general election opponent.
"I flash-forwarded to how I would feel in that position, and I realized that I'd be uncomfortable and it would be bad for McCain to have me in that slot," said McKinnon.
As McCain's strategic attention has turned toward Obama, "I've already started holding back," said McKinnon, who emphasizes he will continue to support McCain fully as "number one friend and cheerleader in chief."
"We can live with whatever Mark has to do," said Salter, who would not address whether the campaign has tried to persuade McKinnon to stay on.
"I'm not suggesting that I won't ever talk to Senator McCain or I won't ever talk to the campaign, but it won't have anything to do with Obama," said McKinnon. "I'll go to the debates and wear my lucky hat. But I won't be in debate prep."
Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.
