With a professional resume that includes jobs with former Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie and President Jimmy Carter, Eliot Cutler believes his experience in crafting public policy best qualifies him to lead as Maine's next governor. The Cape Elizabeth resident is making an independent bid after many years in Democrat politics -- and a few more as a Republican. MPBN's State House Bureau Chief A.J. Higgins has the latest installment of our series of candidate profiles.

Even as a young child, Eliot Cutler was displaying characteristics that suggested a future in law and politics. "I was a somewhat difficult child I think -- I didn't keep my mouth shut a lot of the times when maybe I should have."

And that trait got him into trouble when back in the early 1950s when attending a school committee meeting with his mother. Cutler wanted to share his opinion on school policy despite his mother's objections.

"And I told my mother I wanted to say something, and she said, 'You can't.' And I said, 'But I have something to say.' She said, 'You can't do that.' And I said, 'Well, I have First Amendment rights.' And she looked at me like I was crazy and I raised my hand and stood up and I said what it was I had to say. She took me home after the meeting and literally threw me at my father, who opened the back door, and said, 'Here, you take him. If I spend one more minute with him, I'm going to kill him.'"

Cutler was sent to bed early that night, and obviously lived to tell the tale. But growing up in Bangor in the 1950s provided the backdrop for some of his fondest memories. His father was an internist and chief of medical services at what was then the Eastern Maine General Hospital. His mother was active in social issues. The family was part of Bangor's Jewish community and made a home for their family on Grove Street.

"We used to have a basketball hoop nailed to the garage and we used to play basketball year round," Cutler says. "We'd take our shirts off and play 'shirts and skins' in the middle of the winter. We'd shovel off the driveway, and I remember all the guys who used to come up and play -- we'd have a ball. It was wonderful, growing up."

As he prepared to enter Bangor High School, the U.S. Air Force was increasing its presence at Bangor's former Dow Air Force Base. The classes were so large that Bangor High had two sessions: one in the morning and another at night. Cutler's grades were lagging and his father and mother decided to send their son to Deerfield Academy, an exclusive boarding school in Massachusetts where Cutler's feet were held to the fire by his teachers.

Upon graduating, his grades were good enough to get admitted to Harvard University, where he became the general manager of the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine at the moment that it published its groundbreaking parody of Playboy Magazine.

"It ended up selling out in three days, nationally. We made -- I don't know -- three-quarters of a million dollars, which in those days, in the late 60s was an awful lot of money, it still is now, but, boy, was it a lot then," he says.

Cutler could have joined the rest of the staff, which was in the process of launching the National Lampoon Magazine that would later produce Animal House, the 1978 comedy film that has grossed more than $140 million dollars to date. Instead, he chose to go to work for former Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie and helped shape the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

He later would serve as President Jimmy Carter's associate director for the Office of Management and Budget, a job that reflected the austere national economy of the late 1970s. Cutler went on to spend the next 25 years as a senior member of a prominent Washington, D.C. law firm before deciding to make his pitch as an Independent gubernatorial candidate this year.

He says he wants to use the skills he acquired in establishing national budget priorities to help revamp Maine's economy in a way that balances social and fiscal demands.

"In Maine, we don't leave people lying in the middle of the road. We don't do that. But we have hit the wall. We can't afford to do everything we want to do anymore, and until we get the economy in the state started again, until we start bringing jobs and incomes and opportunity to the state of Maine, until we have economic activity here, we are not going to be able to be the kind of people we want to be."

In making a claim for the middle ground in this year's gubernatorial race, Cutler says he believes Mainers are fed up with Democratic and Republican priorities. "I am in the middle, I am the centrist in this campaign. You've got an extremist candidate on the left, you've got an extremist candidate on the right, you've got a couple of other independents whose skills and experience and backgrounds don't suggest that they're really ready to be governor, and I'm right there in the middle."

Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine, says Cutler could win the Blaine House by offering himself up as the moderate choice for voters who see the Democratic and Republican nominees as too extreme.

"He's trying to make the case to voters, saying, 'I'm different than both of those people, I'm not part of the establishment, I'm not part of what people may see as the problem in this particular cycle. But at the same time, I am not an ideological extremist.'"

Cutler is married to Dr. Melanie Stewart Cutler and has three grown children.