At age 8, he sat at the edges of the family living room, listening to his father, a state legislator, preside over strategy sessions. The reigning princes of moderate Republican politics were often there. Like a sponge, McGavick soaked it up.

At age 14, he was doorbelling, stuffing envelopes and answering the phones at campaign headquarters across town. At 21, he dropped out of college to help Slade Gorton win a U.S. Senate seat in 1980 and later helped run former Gov. Dan Evans' Senate campaign of 1983 and masterminded an unusual Gorton comeback in 1988.

After walking away from politics and making millions in the private sector, the man described as a campaign "natural" hopes to win Gorton's old seat for himself.

Freshly nominated with a landslide 86 percent of the Republican vote, McGavick is taking on the Democratic woman who edged Gorton from office by 2,229 votes in the 2000 election, Maria Cantwell. McGavick insists he didn't walk away from the boardroom of a Fortune 500 company for revenge, but for the next logical chapter of his life.

His father, former state Rep. Joe McGavick, said he never pressured his son to go into the family business of politics, but that "Michael" was a natural. Back when Seattle had a vibrant band of moderate Republican officeholders, the McGavick home was a favorite meeting spot for what senior McGavick calls Teddy Roosevelt progressives.

Young Mike was a quick study as the likes of Evans, Gorton, U.S. Rep. Joel Pritchard and state lawmaker Mary Ellen McCaffree brainstormed for this or that campaign.

He was soon volunteering, hiking up and down steep streets to hand out campaign flyers. In working for his father's three legislative races, he was given the title Potholder Stuffer. His job was to assemble little giveaway packages for doorbelling that included a McGavick potholder and campaign literature.

By 1972, 14-year-old McGavick was volunteering for Gorton, by then running for a second term as attorney general. Gorton, who calls McGavick one of the smartest and most intuitive people he's ever met, was to become his mentor and boss.

McGavick is Irish on both sides of the family, with a liberal sprinkling of Democrats and labor activists in the lineage. Activism and making a difference were taught by example, Joe McGavick said.

Civility and honesty, sometimes foreign in the political world, were frequent topics of those early bull sessions, Mike McGavick recalls. One phrase he remembers: "There is a time for campaigning and a time for governing."

McGavick's other passion was sports. When he was 15, he and his sister bicycled from Canada to Mexico. He broke records in running at Seattle Prep and was ultra-competitive in neighborhood sports. Later, he became passionate about rugby, playing until his early 40s.

McGavick, now living with his second wife Gaelyn and their two young sons in Seattle's old-money enclave called The Highlands, recalls growing up in a small house in a blue-collar neighborhood, with little money but a "pretty normal" homelife.

Bill Pierson, a Seattle attorney who has known McGavick since high school, said McGavick thrived at a strict Jesuit school where the priests demanded excellence on the athletic field and in the classroom.

At the University of Washington, McGavick, a political science major, lost a race for student body president. The winner asked McGavick to create a system for students to rate faculty — part of McGavick's platform. Pierson said McGavick persuaded skeptical faculty and administration to allow the ratings, creating a system that endures today.

In 1980, McGavick dropped out of his senior year to work for Gorton's uphill campaign to oust the state's legendary Sen. Warren G. Magnuson. McGavick dreamed up a publicity stunt that played up Gorton's athleticism and Magnuson's shuffling gait: Gorton and others ran from Seattle to Olympia to file for office.

Helped by Ronald Reagan's victory, Gorton won and McGavick headed to Washington, D.C., as a staffer for defense issues. Diane Tebelius, now state GOP chairwoman, was staff counsel to Gorton's Finance Committee and recalls McGavick as "extraordinarily gifted."

After a few years, he returned to Seattle, finished his degree and began the first of a series of top jobs in public affairs consulting, for Jay Rockey Co. Chris Carlson, now a Democratic business leader in Spokane, calls McGavick "the smartest hire I ever made. There is energy and intelligence that has only become more pronounced with age."

Gorton, meanwhile, lost his re-election bid in 1986, and headed home. When Evans decided not to seek another turn, Gorton came out of retirement.

McGavick and others persuaded Gorton to accept responsibility for his '86 loss, for seeming disdainful and out of touch. In the same year that Washington went Democratic for president and governor, Gorton won.

McGavick got national attention for the win. He recently expressed regret for using an attack ad that used a false report that the Democrat, Mike Lowry, supported legalized pot.

After a stint as Gorton's chief of staff, McGavick turned back to the private sector, an increasingly lucrative path that led to the Washington Roundtable, a group of the state's leading corporate CEOs; the American Insurance Association, where he worked on Superfund environmental cleanup negotiations; CNA Insurance, a Chicago-based giant where he headed the largest unit; and, finally the top spot at Safeco.

"Awfully capable people had turned them down because they thought it wasn't doable," McGavick said. "I was too naive to recognize how difficult it would be."

He pared back the company, slashed the payroll by more than 10 percent, and earned kudos on Wall Street and in the state's boardrooms for saving Safeco. It paid handsomely, too, $9 million a year, and a $28 million when he left.

"If you had rounded up our senior class at Prep for a picture, Mike McGavick would be the last person you'd pick to run a Fortune 500 company," Pierson said. "Everyone thought he'd go off into politics. He didn't strike you as someone terribly interested in making money or particularly entrepenurial."

"I said to him, `Dude, you DO realize that 2006 is going to be a horrible year?' but that's not the kind of thing that deters a Mike McGavick," say Tony Williams, who followed him as Gorton's chief of staff.

McGavick threw himself into his uphill battle with gusto. He traveled the state with a large motorhome and has held numerous "Open Mike" events where he invited all comers to question him or sound off.

His one big pothole came when he disclosed that he had gotten a DUI in 1993, blowing .17 blood alcohol. The police report later showed some discrepancies and critics said he had minimized the incident somewhat. McGavick offered apologies, but said his disclosure was an attempt to be a candidate willing to admit imperfection.

Democratic Chairman Dwight Pelz, though, calls him "Gorton's Karl Rove, a hardball political operative who can't stay away from his partisan roots."

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