Margins Matter with Mark McKinnon and Doug Sosnik

Mark McKinnon (0:08)

Hello, and welcome to Politics War Room with James Carville, and I'm Mark McKinnon. I'm the former chief media advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain's presidential campaigns. Also before I crossed that bridge, worked with Democrats like Anne Richards and Lloyd Doggett with James way back in the day. We'll talk about that, I think, a bit. I was also the creator and co-host of a show on Showtime, a political docu-series called The Circus, which ran for eight years and 130 episodes. We had a front seat to a lot of the madness over the last decade or so in politics, which was fascinating.

Al Hunt is away, getting healthy for a while, and so I'm filling in today, and it's going to be a great show. Very excited that we have, as our guest, former Clinton White House political director and senior political strategist Doug Sosnik. And James and I will talk about him before we put him on to talk about why he's such a great guest and such a great guest right now. So let's get to it.

All right. Hello, Coach Carville. This is great to be with you in the co-pilot seat today.

I'll just do a quick connection here to how you and I got to know each other because you were the very, my very first campaign manager, the very first campaign I ever did. I started off in the mail room licking envelopes, and then I saw a sign that said I could get $5 an hour to do data input, which was twice as much money as I had ever made. So I was doing data input in the basement when Paul Bugalow stumbled down there and said, hey, this is Mark McKinnon. He was the editor of the student newspaper. He should be up doing press. The next thing I know is up doing press with you guys in an epic campaign. Now, just tell our viewers that, well, first of all, I want to say I've had the opportunity and maybe I'll talk a little bit about my kind of weird history. But I'll just say that I've worked with the best strategists on both sides of the aisle, both Democrats and Republicans. And by far, James is the greatest strategist of them all, the GOAT. And I learned more from James than anybody and I've worked with the best. So I want to thank you for that. And it also gave me a career in politics. I mean, I had no idea that I could get in this business where thank God it was unregulated, no licenses. So anyway, a campaign and we won a huge upset primary. And the note I'll say about that is that after that primary, we had to move James out of the headquarters into a building next door because he was scaring the interns so badly.

James Carville (3:00)

Well, you know what they say, you never forget your first time.

You were my first. Yeah, we got, I was laughing Paul and I, we did that. I think we got 43% and then we worked for Clinton and he got 42 and a half in Texas.

Mark McKinnon (3:15)

Yeah, Claudia Woodward was out. I have a point worse.

James Carville (3:19)

I think Pro got a bunch of votes too. Anyway, it's great to be doing this with you and you've been doing this a long time. And the show is, you know, Al is missing, but I have good news. He had surgery, it was very successful.

According to Judy, he was up in, he might even watch the program tomorrow. So hey Al, get well soon and let's go, Mark.

Mark McKinnon (3:43)

That's great, great to hear, James. I'll just mention one other connection, which is Louisiana. After I had worked for Doggett, I went to work for Mark White and lost that campaign. And this is where I discovered, when White hired me, I discovered you could fail upward in politics. But then I didn't know what the hell I was gonna do. And I had a couple options. One of them was, I got on a phone call with Dick Morris and Betsy Wright about working for this guy named Bill Clinton. But our connection was Raymond Strother, who you and I both worked with and for. And Raymond told me at that time, he said, Mark, because I had a couple other things, maybe go to work for Gary Morrow or something like that, this guy from Texas. And Raymond said, Mark, if you think you know anything about politics, go to Louisiana and get your PhD. And so I went to Louisiana in 1987 and worked for Buddy Roemer against Edwin Edwards. And he was right, I learned more in that campaign than any other campaign. It was the most fun I ever had. But let's get to politics in America today.