parents trying to avoid the public school system, including the children of plenty of politicians.

He graduated magna cum laude from Notre Dame, while still managing to have an active social life. He got his law degree from Loyola University in Chicago, also with honors.

A big sports fan, he's especially nutty about Notre Dame football, as only Fighting Irish rooters can he. He likes to golf, playing to a 1 5-handicap before he started the nonstop campaigning. He caddied at Ridge Country Club as a kid and says he probably knows every line from the movie Caddyshack.

He also held summer jobs in construction, as a custodian and at the Chicago Board of Trade.

While most candidates recharged their batteries after the election by heading somewhere warm like the Caribbean, Hynes and his former college roommate headed overseas for a rainy week in Ireland.

His dad's parents were from County Galway. "That is my refuge," Hynes says of Ireland. The buddy, Jim McCarthy, a Washington, D.C., media consultant, still marvels at the summer the well-behaved Hynes spent living with his family while working on Capitol Hill, prompting McCarthy's parents to joke about "the model son we've rented."

There is a too-good-to-be-true aspect to Hynes' persona, and Republicans will undoubtedly be trying to isolate it over the next four years, probably hoping to give him just enough rope in his new position to hang himself Being a can't-miss prospect, after all, doesn't mean he couldn't lose. He could get boxed in like his dad if the Democrats somehow win back the governor's office in 2002 with another candidate.

Time is definitely on Hynes' side, except in one small way. The tinge of gray is already evident at a distance in that full head of hair; something else he inherited from his father. If the genes hold true to form, he figures he'll be totally gray in five years, an ever-so-slight impediment for someone positioning himself as the youth candidate.

Nothing to fear; he says. "I hope to never lose touch with what 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds are thinking.".

Mark Brown is a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times.