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CENTRE — Gadsden businessman and Iraq War veteran Phil Williams is sick and tired of being sick and tired.

“I know that sounds like a cliché,” Williams told The Post during an exclusive interview earlier this month. “But I'm a conservative Republican, and I don't feel like our values are being represented in Montgomery.”

Williams, a former youth minister and the son of Gov. Fob James's state finance director. He has been married to his wife, Charlene, for 23 years. They have two children.

Williams was lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve serving in Iraq when sovereignty was handed back over to the Iraqis. He said being in the roomful of Iraqis who were risking their lives to serve on a local district council had an extreme effect on his political outlook.

“Theirs was an entire generation that had never had an elected officials,” Williams said. “It was amazing to watch these people get excited in a meeting, just to get to raise their hand and vote.”

Williams still carried a picture he snapped of a group of local elected officials during a gathering in Iraq. Since it was taken, at least a few have been the target of assassination attempts. Williams said the photo reminds him how precious the gift of representative government really is.

“These guys really put it all on the line, even their lives, to run for office,” he said. “After seeing that and what's happening here, I had to get involved.”

Williams said one of the most troubling aspects to him was a report he read that listed Alabama as the fourth most corrupt in the country.

“It's horrible to read that,” he said. “There are grand jury hearings right now on bingo legislation.”

Williams said the problem stems from the Senate's repeated failures to address so-called PAC-to-PAC transfers, which allow financial contributions to candidates to be hidden through a series of hand-offs from one political action committee to another.

“For the past decade, the bill to bans those transfers has passed the House and then stalled in the Senate,” he said. “That tells me that they don't want people to know where the money comes from. And if they're embarrassed to say, they should never have taken it to begin with.”

Williams identified himself as a “state's rights guy,” and said he wants to change  government's current bad habit of handing down mandates.

“That's from Montgomery up, and Washington down,” Williams said. “We can draw a line in the sand and tell the federal government to back off.”

Williams said he is no fan of gambling, but believes the people deserve the opportunity to vote on the issue.

“I think [the gambling question] ought to be taken out of the hands of a bunch of legislators who take money from lobbyists,” he said. “We handled it that way on the lottery, and my hope is the people will say no and be done with it.”

To read Williams's four-part campaign platform, visit www.williamsforalabamasenate.com.