The soon to be Democratic nominee for Governor in Florida, Alex Sink, spoke to members of the media tonight, a couple of hours before she was to officially be declared the winner at her victory party celebration at the Sheraton Tampa Riverwalk Hotel.

Try as we might, we really couldn't crack the veneer of platitudes that she and her husband, the Democratic nominee for Governor in 2002, Bill McBride, were distributing in terms of responses to our questions.

CL asked her if her strategy running against Bill McCollum would be different than that against Rick Scott, since Scott is definitely not a part of the Republican establishment, whereas McCollum is a charter member. She said not really.

"My message is going to be the same, " she said, before discussing her detailed business plan and her goal to reform government. When asked by WMNF's Kate Bradshaw a theme on the same question, she emphasized that her platform would appeal to Democrats, Republicans and independents. "I'm not really interested in partisanship" she added.

When asked if she'll go off the corruption inside the Florida GOP, which led to former Party chair Jim Greer being indicted on fraud and theft charges, Sink said, "Certainly one of the reasons why I'm running for Governor is that, although my career was in business, I've been in Tallahassee just three short years, and I've been there long enough to see the partisan bickering, and the corruption, and the indictments coming out of Tallahassee and I have a plan to come it up."

Today it was announced that home sales in the Tampa Bay area are down 19% from year-ago levels, and nationally the steep drop pushed homes sales down to the lowest level in 15 years, despite the lowest mortgage rates in decades and bargain prices in many areas.

Cl asked Alex Sink, the Chief Financial Officer for Florida, if there's really anything she or the Republican candidate can truly do to transform Florida (and the nation's) sliding economy?  "Well, one of the things that we can do is the government spends a lot of money to keep government going" she said, "we ought to be looking at who we're doing business with.  I think when the government contracts with businesses, we ought to give preferences to Florida based businesses who are going to agree to hire Floridians.  That's one way to put thousands of Floridians back to work almost immediately."

This article appears in Aug 19-25, 2010.