Angus King was just as surprised as everyone else just over a year ago when Sen. Olympia Snowe announced she wouldn’t be seeking a fourth term. “That was a Wednesday,” said the former governor, who served from 1995-2003, and thought he was permanently retired from politics. “I figured I’d have to decide by the weekend.”

So King, now 69, followed his usual practice – he gathered former staff and advisers, and asked for their views. “It was not unanimous,” he said. “Several of them really thought I shouldn’t run.”

But a day later, he was thinking about a friend’s advice “to regret the things you did do with your life, not the things you didn’t do.” At that point, “ I knew I’d decided.”

King won election to the Senate handily, taking 53 percent of the vote in a three-way race as an independent, besting a Republican and a Democrat with the same formula he used in winning two terms as governor.

On a day last month in Washington, he provided access to his staff as well as several interviews during the day. King admitted that, between the November election and January, he’d had second thoughts: “I wondered what I’d gotten myself in for.” Four months later, there are no more doubts: “It seems like this is the job I’ve been preparing for all my life.”

Snowe left office saying that she was weary of partisanship, with Congress so gridlocked nothing substantive gets done. King seems to see gridlock as a challenge, both intellectual and political, that he can use his skills to help solve.

There are days that put this notion to the test. One was April 17, when the Senate prepared to debate the Manchin-Toomey amendment to pending gun legislation, providing broader background checks for purchasers. The Senate had already voted 68-31 to debate the bill, and King figured background checks would get similar support.

“There was no straight-faced argument against it,” he said, “no Second Amendment issue.” It wasn’t like a ban on assault weapons or large ammunition clips, which he opposed. Yet the Senate could only muster 55 votes; it needed 60 under rules already set for amendments.

King had just been meeting with parents of the Newtown, Conn. first graders who lost their lives on Dec. 14, and he was stunned. “It was really disappointing,” he said. “I was pissed that day.”

Just after the vote, he started to talk with a Republican senator he’d thought would support background checks. “I had to walk away from that conversation,” he said. “I was worried about what I might say.”

On a day-to-day basis, King is encouraged that, politics aside, senatorial relationships are mostly cordial: “I serve on a committee with Ted Cruz” – often seen as a tea party firebrand from Texas – “and we have our differences, but we can do business.”

King caucuses with the Democrats, and was offered a choice roster of committee assignments, four in all. In addition to the Armed Services Committee, a traditional assignment for Mainers, he serves on Rules, Intelligence and the powerful Budget Committee, which rarely admits freshmen.

King admits that “I didn’t know much about intelligence when I got here,” but he’s been a quick study, asking sharp questions about NSA programs that collect Americans’ phone records.

The Budget Committee provided his first taste of what he calls, “real legislating,” when it produced a budget bill that, for the first time in four years, passed the Senate; it currently awaits a conference with the House.

When the bill went to the floor, “Everyone was there, for the first time I’d seen,” he said. “No cell phones, no staff, just the senators, debating through the night.”

Yet he admits such moments are rare. Unlike state legislatures, which meet together in daily sessions, a congressional debate often features one senator speaking and a handful of others listening in an otherwise empty chamber. On this day, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) was giving her maiden speech – King offered his earlier – and he wanted to be there to show his support.

Majority Leader Harry Reid was at his desk, and there was a handful of staff and other Democrats. Sen. Susan Collins, Maine’s senior senator, was briefly visible, but that was it.

The Senate, and the House, have long been committee-dominated, and even on major issues senators often show up only long enough to vote. King sees how the Senate “bubble” contributes to partisanship. “Because we’re almost never together, it’s hard to persuade anyone,” he said.

King recalled a speech by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who was governor during the Virginia Tech shootings. “It was one of the most powerful speeches I’ve ever heard,” he said – delivered to a near-empty chamber. If more senators had heard it, the outcome on Manchin-Toomey “might have been different.”

King says the apparent gridlock isn’t total. “We did pass a budget. There’s movement on judges, on presidential appointments that have been blocked a long time,” he said. And perhaps by next month, a comprehensive immigration reform bill could be approved.

King organized an informal caucus of 11 former governors who serve in the Senate. “They’re a lot more pragmatic, and less ideological,” he said.

King is sensitive to criticism he’s just a Democrat with an “I” before his name. He acknowledged that “I’m comfortable in the caucus. Harry Reid has been great to me.” And he holds typically Democratic positions on social issues and some budget questions. He’s not convinced, for instance, that the Republican drive for fiscal austerity makes sense, given the weak recovery.

Where he does differ from Democrats is regulation. He thinks they’re “far too ready to pile on regulations” with huge compliance costs. An example is the Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010 over near-unanimous Republican opposition. It was intended to tame Wall Street excesses that helped produce the 2008 financial crisis.

“It’s nearly a thousand pages, but will it work?” King asks. “Already, the banks are finding ways to get around it.” His approach, he said, is simpler, and structural: “We should restore Glass-Steagall.” That’s the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks, repealed in 1999. “If the big banks want to gamble, they should use their own money, not ours, ” he said. “But we shouldn’t be piling regulations on community banks. They did nothing to cause the problem.”

King’s initial office space snafu demonstrates the hidden effects of federal policies – in this case the sequester – that rarely get much media attention. Until June, King’s 22-member staff was packed into a room barely big enough to fit theirs desks; King’s office was big enough for a sofa. The reason? Because of the mid-year budget cuts, only one person was painting the new office.

It’s clear from the way he spends his time that education remains a passion. King is perhaps best known as governor for providing laptop computers for all students, an enduring effort the LePage administration just renewed.

Just before lunch, King zipped over to the Hart Office Building to meet with Long Island, N.Y. high school students. His 25-year-old press secretary, Scott Ogden, said this was typical. “He’s 69, but we have trouble keeping up with him.”

The talk could be termed a civics lesson, but the students didn’t seem bored. King talked about the American system of divided government, and said the founders were concerned Congress not act hastily. The six-year Senate term, with one-third of senators elected every two years, was intended “to keep the coffee from getting too hot,” he said. “Sometimes, it slows to the point where nothing’s getting done. The coffee isn’t supposed to freeze.”

An hour later, he was at the Senate television studio where he connected to a Brewer High School class by Skype, part of a project to visit, electronically, with every high school in Maine during his six-year term.

This session was more like a news conference, for which the students had prepared for weeks, asking sharply worded questions – the kind of event Washington rarely sees. King answered them all, though when they involved state issues, he demurred. “I’ve had a policy since I left office never to comment on or criticize my successors,” he said. It’s one point on which he can’t be budged.

Can one senator really make a difference? Just before a Budget Committee hearing, King sat in his hideaway – the small retreats each senator has close to the floor – and reflected on how he got there.

“My parents were both teachers, and my whole family is in education,” he said. “We should respect our educators, but people downgrade them all the time.” Based on his experience with his kids in Brunswick’s schools, he said, “We have better teachers than we deserve.”

Now, education is changing rapidly, and “the way students learn is through collaboration, not competition,” which, eventually, will change the way government works. “In the end, it’s all about relationships and how we treat each other,” he said.

Whatever its flaws, America’s open society sets it apart, he said. “It’s not just about who your family is, or where you were born.” He described computer pioneer Steve Jobs as “the most important person of our time,” who started “with no advantages of any kind.”

King points to small victories as the start of change. “The House didn’t want to take up the Violence Against Women Act,” he said when it was up for reauthorization. But when the Senate passed it overwhelmingly, “It created momentum and they were forced to act.” He sees similar outcomes possible with immigration or even the budget.

To succeed in breaking gridlock, though, King says President Obama must step up. Going back to the beginning of his administration, Obama deferred to Congress in writing the Affordable Care Act, because he believed Bill Clinton’s health care plan failed when the administration took over the details. But the 2009 effort from Congress failed to attract Republican support – a pattern that’s held true since on major legislation.

“Sometimes we over-learn the lessons of history,” King said. “There’s no substitute for presidential leadership.”