Florida attorney general candidates match wits in TV debate

From Steve Bousquet of The St. Petersburg Times on Aug. 1:

TALLAHASSEE — In their first joint TV appearance Saturday, all three Republican candidates for attorney general matched wits and contrasted their qualifications to be the state's next chief legal officer.

The three GOP hopefuls hit their strong points, but former Hillsborough prosecutor Pam Bondi seemed more confident than Holly Benson or Jeff Kottkamp. With her terse answers, Bondi excelled in a sound bite-driven format in which candidates were limited to answers of one minute or less.

Bondi also deftly used the chance to question her opponents, calling both "key members of the Crist-Kottkamp administration."

Benson served as a two-time agency head appointee under Gov. Charlie Crist, but when she described her experience, she said: "I worked with Gov. Jeb Bush."

Kottkamp is the lieutenant governor under Crist, an unpopular figure in Republican circles after he bolted from the party three months ago and drifted leftward to appeal to independents and Democrats as a U.S. Senate candidate.

Kottkamp said he and Crist have not spoken since April 29, the day Crist became an independent Senate candidate.

"I've never been a politician," Bondi said, seeking to tap the same anti-incumbent sentiment that Rick Scott has exploited in the governor's race. "I've not spent my career behind a desk in Tallahassee, but on the front lines."

All three candidates said they opposed Crist's proposed referendum to permanently ban oil drilling in Florida's Constitution.

All three also repeatedly used the word "Obamacare" in promising to carry on with Attorney General Bill McCollum's lawsuit seeking to block the new federal health care mandates.

"Draw a line in the sand and say, 'Enough is enough,' " Kottkamp said.

One of the rare areas of disagreement concerned immigration. Benson, a former state House member from Pensacola, emphasized her support for less regulation of business and said she supports deportation of all undocumented immigrants in Florida.

"The illegal ones need to be shipped back," Benson said.

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