BY KELLEY BOUCHARD

MaineToday Media, Inc.

Chellie Pingree is giving a pep talk to several members of the Maine Women's Leadership Political Action Committee.

Standing in the living room of a finely appointed Falmouth Foreside home, the former state senator and Democratic candidate for Maine's 1st Congressional District seat urges the women to soldier on in their campaigns for the Maine Legislature.

It's worth it, she says, knocking on all those doors, attending all those coffees, community suppers and debates, telling people over and over what you want to do and how you're going to do it.

"This is going to be the year of the woman in Maine," Pingree, 53, says confidently. "Women are the ultimate in change agents and there couldn't be a better time."

Pingree notes that she is poised to venture into national politics at a remarkable time for American women in general, following U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton's near miss as the Democratic presidential nominee and Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate.

She cracks wise about Palin's down-home, back-woods personal narrative. A mother of three and grandmother of one, Pingree points to her own experience as a farmer and inn owner on North Haven, the Penobscot Bay island where she has raised pigs and chickens, sheared sheep and milked cows.

"I have never actually field-dressed a moose, but I am eminently qualified," she promises, drawing laughter from the gathering. The group includes her daughter, Hannah, also a Democrat, who is seeking re-election as North Haven's state representative and aiming for the House speaker's job.

If the elder Pingree wins the seat now held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, who is challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, she will be the first woman to represent District 1 and the first woman Democrat to represent Maine in Congress.

The dollar figures favor Pingree in the Nov. 4 race against Republican Charlie Summers.

According to June 30 campaign funding reports, the most recent available, he had raised $289,000 and spent $235,000, while she had raised $1.6 million and spent $1.4 million.

More than $52,000 in Pingree's campaign kitty came through wealthy hedge fund manager S. Donald Sussman, whom she has been dating for several months and has counted among her supporters for several years. The money includes contributions from his colleagues at Paloma Partners, a hedge fund based in Greenwich, Conn.

At the polls, Pingree took 44 percent of the vote in June's six-way Democratic primary. When Summers challenged Allen in 2004, the incumbent retained his seat with 60 percent of the vote. And Democrats have won nine of the last 10 races for the seat in a district that is 38 percent unenrolled, 32 percent Democrat, 27 percent Republican and 3 percent Green Independent.

"There's a good confidence level with her campaign, but nobody wants to be overly confident," says state Rep. Janet Mills, D-Farmington, a candidate at the Foreside gathering who is seeking re-election and hoping that her fellow legislators will name her state attorney general in December.

Pingree knows what it's like to lose. In 2002, she tried to unseat Collins, who won with 58 percent of the vote. Back then, Pingree says, so soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, people were fearful and looking inward. She's getting a much different vibe from voters now.

"I feel like I'm actually in a different country," Pingree tells the group. "You can really feel people want something different. I have this great sense of hope that people want to do things differently."

On the campaign trail, Pingree presents herself as a careful yet approachable candidate who has a holistic approach to many national issues, from economic instability to energy dependence to health care reform.

Pingree describes the Iraq war as "the worst foreign policy mistake in our country's history" and says it's time to bring it to a close and refocus federal money and efforts on long-neglected domestic problems. She sees the solutions as interrelated and dependent on having a vibrant economy, good jobs, an educated workforce, healthy families, affordable housing and clean-energy sources.

"I don't think it's all black and white," Pingree says.

A native of Minneapolis, Minn., she graduated from the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor with a bachelor's degree in human ecology. She moved to North Haven in 1971 with the man she married and later divorced. She stayed there and started a successful mail-order knitting company that employed many island women.

She began her political career as a town assessor and a member of the island's school and planning boards. She went on to serve eight years in the Maine Senate, including two terms as majority leader, when she pushed through the Maine Rx law to lower prescription drug costs. After her 2002 attempt to unseat Collins, she headed Common Cause, a nonpartisan citizens' lobby, from 2003 to 2007.

At a recent candidates' forum hosted by the Maine Development Foundation in Augusta, Pingree calls for greater investment and involvement by the federal government in everything from rebuilding roads and bridges across Maine to improving access to the Internet in rural parts of the state.

She says some of the annual $18 billion federal subsidy to the profitable oil industry should be invested in developing wind, solar and tidal energy industries in Maine. She questions federal priorities that expect taxpayers to bail out the troubled real estate and investment industries while education, social service and health care initiatives lack funding or lay fallow.

"What would it take to shift those (federal) priorities ... to help the state of Maine and not leave us at the end of the line?" Pingree asks at the forum.

One couple shows how Pingree's message translates to the audience.

"She has a keen understanding of what lower- and middle-income people in Maine are going through," says Karen White, 55, a Democrat who lives in Gray and works for the state as an infant and toddler specialist.

White's life partner, Ed Getty, 56, is a real estate broker and a Republican.

"She wants to do a lot," Getty says. "She seems headed in many directions, and as a freshman congressman, you can only attempt to do so much, so you have to be careful what you promise."

A patient and focused listener, Pingree's demeanor is usually reserved, often unsmiling, until it's her turn to talk. Then she becomes an animated storyteller and directed speaker, rattling off statistics and drawing connections between diverse issues. She describes herself as basically shy and averse to dressing up, wearing plain gray or brown pantsuits and little or no makeup at recent campaign events.

"I like doing my job, but I'm not in this for my ego," she says. "I think of this job as being a public servant, not a celebrity."

Still, Pingree and her campaign staff are careful to control the candidate's message in the media. Pingree didn't allow a Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram reporter to attend meetings she had last week with members of Portland's immigrant community and Sanford's veterans.

Later, Pingree said the immigrants told her about the challenges they face in getting an education, finding jobs and living in a whole new place. The veterans told her what she can do to improve access to health care, housing and other services for the more than 140,000 former military people living in Maine.

Pingree welcomes the company of a reporter during a recent tour of the Preble Street women's shelter in Portland, where she talks with staff members and several women who have been homeless for months. Pingree, who volunteered occasionally at a Washington, D.C., soup kitchen when she worked for Common Cause, is obviously comfortable in a place that few people visit.

One of the women, Debbie Priest, 51, has been living at the shelter for more than a year. She says she's disabled and waiting for a housing subsidy so she can move into an apartment and get her belongings out of storage. She tells Pingree that she sleeps on the same cot in the same spot every night, and if someone gets there before her, she negotiates to get it back.

"So, it's your safe spot," Pingree says.

"It's my safe spot," Priest agrees.

Pingree leaves the shelter with a charge to do what she can in Washington to improve access to housing, health care, education and jobs for people in need. She sees the possibility that many people are one paycheck away from being in a similar spot. She pledges to do what she can to restore funding to social service programs that have been cut in recent years.

"Any one of these women could be your sister, your mother, your daughter," Pingree says. "It just happens. Life just falls apart for some people. So little money separates us from them. I always believe that people want to succeed, and with a little help, many of them can."