Although former Hillsborough County prosecutor Pam Bondi continues to win straw polls amongst GOP activists in the race for the nomination for Republican attorney general, one of her opponents, Holly Benson is conceding nothing in the battle that will be decided on August 24.
In the only state-wide poll taken on the race, Lieutenant Governor Jeff Kottcamp leads with 13 percent of the vote, followed by Bondi at 10 percent, and Benson with 5 percent. Which means the great majority of the state voters have barely paid attention to this race, or any of the other Cabinet races.
Benson is best know as running two different state agencies under Charlie Crist's helm: The Agency for Health Administration, and the Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Before that, she served three terms in the Florida House, representing Pensacola.
Benson says that even though she declared for the office last fall, the urgency of becoming the state's AG has only grown after Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced earlier this spring that he would be filing a lawsuit to try to block the health care reform legislation from taking effect in 2014, because he claims that it's individual mandate that every citizen buy health insurance is unconstitutional.
"It's going to cost taxpayers well over a billion dollars," Benson says about the cost of implementing the system in Florida. " It’s going to cost businesses millions of dollars, it is going to wreck one of the best health care systems in the world, so the first fight this next Attorney General is going to take on is the fight against Obamacare because McCollum filed suit in Pensacola. I’m prepared to take that fight on, and it’s important and not just for our health care system but everything else that Washington is going to do to the states."
This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2010.
