Thank you to David Hart and the Irregular for chatting with Peter Mills. The complete article is on theirregular.com. Here are some excerpts:

“I was 51 years old when I decided to run for a seat in the Senate,” the 66-year-old senator said.

The gubernatorial candidate said he took office as a senator for two years for a newly formed district in Somerset County. “I ran in 1994 and spent eight straight years in the senate and was termed out,” he said. He then went to the House of Representatives for one term, and returned to the senate thereafter. Mills is currently in his third term back in the senate.

“It’s easy to think about it as 15 years of legislative experience which is 15 years more than anybody else in the Republican Primary added together. I’ve been there,” he explained. “Why they are trying to be governor without any understanding of what the job entails is way beyond me. That’s the real question.”

Mills grandfather was in the House and Senate back in 1903 and went on to become a lawyer by reading law and never actually going to law school. He came to Farmington where he met his wife whose family dates far back in Farmington history books.

in discussing the Mills family…

Dr. Dora Anne Mills is director of the Maine Bureau of Health and Maine’s chief health officer. Mills said that ironically she and the rest of her staff were currently fighting off the H1N1 virus. Mills chuckled by saying that based on their own medical protocol, they were not eligible for the vaccine themselves. Hundreds of thousands doses of the vaccine have gone through Dr. Mills’ Maine Center for Disease Control office.

on his experience in the legislature…

“I like to write legislation, I like to argue for legislation. I like to debate….” Mills explained. “I am the person who people go to in the state legislature to get a bill written, passed or fought for. I get lobbied more heavily then any other member of the legislature. It’s hard to sometimes get to the bathroom because I can not get down the hall. It’s a thrilling experience for me and I like every bit of it.”