One of the top advisors on Mike McGavick's civility-themed Senate campaign is an accomplished purveyor of the negative political ad. Henry "Eddie" Mahe Jr. says that reputation "may or may not have anything to do with reality." But just minutes into an interview earlier today, it's clear this guy isn't afraid to land a punch.

"I bring to the campaign sufficient experience to be able to evaluate what might make the most sense given the circumstances of the race we have to run. There are times you chop people's heads off and there are times when you don't. I've done both. This is not a formulaic business. This isn't chemistry."

Mahe, 69, says he and McGavick are long time friends. McGavick hired Mahe for Slade Gorton's 1988 election, which McGavick managed. Mahe said he'd work on the McGavick campaign for free "if it were not for the insanity of these laws." As a professional campaign consultant, the law won't allow him to work gratis.

So far McGavick's campaign has paid more than $50,000 to the D.C. law firm where Mahe works. Campaign reports filed with the FEC showing those payments led a Democratic operative to point out to me that Mahe worked for that firm. (Mahe said he is the only one at the firm working on the McGavick campaign.) The point being the obvious dynamic of a campaign based on civility getting advice from a consultant with a resume of hard-hitting tactics.

Here's what made this a story for me: Eddie Mahe is an influential player in GOP politics and in the interview today he gave an insider's view of negative campaigning as well as his view that the atmoshphere may be changing in a way that makes that sort of advertising less effective.

Does Mahe deserve a reputation as a negative campaigner? He was quoted in a 1990 article about the infamous Willie Horton ad that an independent group ran against Michael Dukakis, saying, "We can't worry about being too negative. ... If we don't get the anti-Dukakis message out, we can't win — period." Mahe was a George H.W. Bush backer in '88 but was not involved with production of the Horton ad.

He didn't remember it when I asked him, but Mahe was paid $25,000 by a wealthy Chicagoan for helping with "Troopergate," the story pushed by conservatives about alleged adultery during Bill Clinton's tenure as Arkansas governor.

Mahe told me, "I never received any compensation of any kind for anything" related to the case, but helped a friend for free. But after being reminded that word of the $25,000 payment was attributed to him in the media, Mahe said, "Well if I said it, it had to be true at that point. I won't deny it. I don't remember even what I did to earn the money."

Press accounts quote Mahe as saying he reviewed material collected in Arkansas to see if the mainstream press would be interested in the story and helped publicize the allegations against Clinton.

Mahe also has ties to Americans for Job Security, one of the pioneering, business-backed independent political groups. That group was launched with help from the American Insurance Association, where McGavick once worked. Mahe was a consultant for the insurance group and was credited in the press with helping AJS get started, though he said today he has never been paid by AJS.

Americans for Job Security ran ads to help Republican Sen. Slade Gorton in his 2000 campaign against Maria Cantwell. Mahe was a consultant to Gorton that year. Ads by the group in Washington state and elsewhere have been criticized on editorial pages around the country for being negative or for the lack of disclosure of the financial backers of the group.

Mahe said that negative campaigns work, almost anywhere in the country. (He said places like Washington and Minnesota don't like to admit that.) He said the country is gradually coming out a 10-year period in which "I don't know if there was any rational limit" on how negative a campaign could go.

"We all had to do it and I underline the word had." He said if a campaign put up a "soft/fuzzy" ad and poll "numbers didn't move an inch in your behalf and then you put a tough one and all of a sudden the numbers move, what are you going to do?"

Mahe said campaigns don't create negativity, but reflect the zeitgeist.

"For the last 10 years the whole culture has been mean, it has been tough, it has had a rough edge to it. So why would we expect our material, our presentation, to be significantly different?"

Mahe thought there would be a bigger shift by now away from negative campaigning. His candidate in Washington has made civility the main theme of his campaign. And by Mahe's early predictions that would have been a perfect fit with broader societal and cultural changes in America.

He said, though, that "it's just barely happening." And the real change may not be evident until 2008.

"This cycle is still puzzling to me. The campaigns to this stage are continuing to be overrun by events. The campaigns are not defining the political environment yet."

If things aren't turning out like Mahe thought, does that mean that McGavick will rethink his civility campaign?

No way, McGavick says. He told me this afternoon that he and Mahe have never talked about Mahe's theory of the country's coming shift away from negative campaigns.

"I've never thought about it as where society was going, so much as where it ought to go," McGavick said. "We're not doing it because we think it's a good tactic, we're doing it because we think it's right."

McGavick lacks Mahe's bravado about negative campaigning. In a 2002 speech to the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, McGavick said:

"We clearly need to raise the level of civil discourse in our community. If I see one more of those negative 30-second ads, I'm going to throw up — and I used to make them!"

That's a reference to his work as Gorton's campaign manager in 1988. When I asked McGavick about that statement today, though, he backed away from it some.

"I have to admit that's a little bit of an overstatement," he said.

There was one ad in the campaign against Democrat Mike Lowry that McGavick says he regrets. It claimed Lowry supported legalizing marijuana and it was based on something in the University of Washington student newspaper.

McGavick defended the ad at the time despite charges that the information was suspect. The Times reported that year: "Asked if he had any more evidence that Lowry supports legalization, Gorton's campaign manager Mike McGavick snapped: 'I have no indication that he doesn't.' "

"It was a mistake," McGavick said. "I've always second-guessed whether we should have pulled the ad."

I told McGavick that I was pointed toward Mahe's role in his campaign by a Democratic operative. He responded, "It's a continuation of this whole guilt by association campaign they are running."

UPDATE: In the paper today is an excerpt of this post. The headline says: "NEGATIVE TURN BY CAMPAIGN?" For the record, I don't think so. I don't write the headlines. I think that headline put a negative twist on the piece that wasn't necessary.