Last week a hot story on Florida political blogs was the issue of Democratic Attorney General candidate Dan Gelber and his resignation from his place of employment, Akerman Senterfitt, after the law firm took on disgraced oil giant BP as a client.
Gelber's Democratic opponent, fellow state Senator Dave Aronberg, issued a press release a week ago Monday calling on Gelber to resign because of the association with the company that the next Attorney General could very well end up in litigation with.
Gelber angrily responded that the Aronberg statement was a shameless political stunt, because he said in fact he had resigned days earlier. That led to a back and forth about when Gelber had actually announced his resignation, since he had told a business journal in mid June that it was a "non-issue."
Aronberg's team disputed that they knew when Gelber had quit, and in fact Gelber's e-mail saying when he would do so would be in "early July."
In any event, South Florida Democrat Nan Rich is now coming out and endorsing Gelber, after saying that she preferred to stay out of the race until Democrats chose a candidate on August 24. Rich says Team Aronberg's attacks on the Gelber camp represents the "politics as usual"campaign rhetoric that she wishes would just go away:
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2010.