Pam Bondi had been enjoying a relatively controversy-free tenure as Florida's Attorney General since being elected in 2010. Yes, she offended some liberals with her continued legal advocacy against the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (a suit initiated by her predecessor, Bill McCollum), but those voters didn't supported her in the first place.
Then Bondi acknowledged that she delayed the scheduled public execution of convicted murderer Marshall Lee Gore from Sept. 10 until Oct. 1 to attend a fundraiser. The news was a colossal embarrassment for the Tampa native, and it prompted Democrat George Sheldon to run against Bondi in next year's election.
Sheldon is the second Democrat to announce his candidacy for AG. Outgoing House Minority Leader Perry Thurston of Fort Lauderdale entered the race just days after Shelton announced late last month.
Sheldon admits that he doesn't expect to compete on a dollar-to-dollar basis with Bondi in fundraising, and that his chances of winning will diminish if he gets seriously outspent by the GOP incumbent. That's why he was in Hyde Park in Tampa on Wednesday night, holding a fundraiser at The Lodge Restaurant & Bar.
"We’ve got to have an aggressive fund raising effort," he told CL. "We’ve got to be competitive."
The 66-year-old Sheldon is an old-school Florida Democrat with a lengthy resume of public service. He was first elected to the state Legislature nearly four decades ago, serving from 1974-1982. In 1999, Attorney General Bob Butterworth selected him as Deputy AG. Sheldon then became the Democratic Party's nominee for Education Commissioner in 2000, losing out to Charlie Crist (that was before the state changed the job to a non-elected office — and before Crist switched from Republican to Democrat). He was defeated by current Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer in his bid for the Democratic nomination for AG in 2002.
In 2008, Governor Charlie Crist selected Sheldon to run the troubled Florida Department of Children and Families, where he was praised for making major improvements in the long-troubled social service agency. Sheldon then went to Washington to work in the Department of Health & Human Services.
It was there that he says he saw up close some of the positive things that government can do for people, and contrasted that with the 16-day government shutdown led by House Republicans last month. "I saw a kind of right-wing response to government, and that's concerning to me," Sheldon said, adding that he was also disappointed that Republicans in Tallahassee have refused to expand Medicaid as part of implementing the ACA.
"We’ve got to rise above the partisan fray, we've got to stop standing our ground and start finding common ground," he asserts. Sheldon says things in Tallahassee are quite different than when he served in the Legislature in the 1970s and '80s, where there were definitely policy disagreements between Democrats and Republicans, but nothing like today.
Sheldon says the partisan divide has been exacerbated by a Republican Party that has gone to the hard right in recent decades, and quotes Republican friends who say they don't recognize their own party. And it's that dissatisfaction with the Tea Party right that Sheldon says he's appealing to, hoping to attract moderate Republicans and independents to go along with the Democratic base to defeat the formidable Bondi.
Under both Butterworth and Charlie Crist, the AG's office in Florida was a powerful bully pulpit protecting consumers in the state, and Sheldon says he would restore that ethic if he were to defeat Bondi next year. He says her decision to delay a public execution in the Gore case shows a "serious lack of judgement."
Although Wednesday night's fundraiser was Sheldon's initial campaign event in Tampa, it certainly won't be his last. He says he's strongly considering placing his central campaign office in Tampa.
This article appears in Nov 21-27, 2013.