Florida’s Nasty Governor’s Race, Stand Your Ground Law and Corrupt Sugar Politics

Tampa Bay Times reporter Craig Pittman – a native of Floridian – addresses why many people consider the southern sunny state one of America’s most idiosyncratic. Among other topics, he delves into the controversial Stand Your Ground gun-rights law, the too-close-to-call gubernatorial race between incumbent Rick Scott and Charlie Crist, and the alleged corruption surrounding the state’s powerful sugar industry lobby.

When asked about the notion that Florida is the nation’s capital of greed, Pittman said the reputation has been around for a long time.

“We’ve been a haven for hustlers for decades now. We are - to borrow a phrase from another writer - a sunny place for shady people. It’s a legacy dating back to at least the 1910s and the 1920s – when we were selling swampland to the Yankees and convincing them that this was prime real estate and then they got stuck holding the bag.”

The discussion also turns to the George Zimmerman trial – in which the defendant was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the 2012 shooting death of Tayvon Martin – and Pittman says

“Using the Stand Your Ground Law, I think that’s how it had to turn out – much to the chagrin of the people watching it outside or Florida. But the jurors said, several of them said, when we looked at the Stand Your Ground law, this was the only outcome we could come up with.”

In terms of the overall gun culture, Pittman says that Florida leads the nation in the number of concealed weapons permits, partly because many people feel they don’t know and can’t trust their neighbors.

“Sometimes the weapon is a machete or Samurai sword, or something exotic like that,” he said. “One of the problems we have in Florida is that people think a gun is a magic wand that can solve all their problems and so they pull one out whenever there’s a dispute.”

Speaking about the Florida governor’s race between Scott and Crist, Pittman says Florida voters are notoriously fickle. “The current status of the race is that it is pretty much neck-in-neck, Crist holds a slight lead in the polls now. And both candidates are running ads now that basically say, ‘Vote for me, because I’m not that other guy.’

Florida has seven major media markets, and all are currently being flooded with political ads. “Right now the ads we’re seeing the most, all over Florida, are attack ads – Rick Scott attacking Charlie Crist, Charlie Crist attacking Rick Scott, and you can’t even turn on YouTube without getting bombarded with these ads now.”

“The Scott camp is pointing at Crist and saying he hangs out with crooks and fraudsters, and the Crist camp is pointing fingers at Scott and saying he is a crook and a fraudster. And so that’s pretty much the issues that are being debated these days.”

The Florida-based U.S. Sugar Corp is America’s largest producer of sugar cane and has significant political influence in the state, according to Pittman. “We exposed that U.S. Sugar was paying for secret trips for a lot of Florida politicians, including the governor, to take down to King Ranch to go hunting. It was showing up in anybody’s campaign finance reports, it wasn’t even listed on the governor’s official schedule that he was down there.”

He said the role U.S. Sugar plays is very much behind the scenes, spends a lot of money, and their lobbyists get a lot of access. “I was calling members of congress from Florida asking, ‘Have you been to King Ranch, have you been there for these secret hunting trips,’ where they basically bought access to these politicians. And one congressional aide said ‘No, they don’t need to do that, they just walk in the door and they get to talk to my boss.”

He also addressed the many retirees that decide to settle in Florida from either the northeastern U.S. or Midwest, and said both groups have commonalities in their attitudes about living their later years in Florida.

“One thing that they both seem to have in common is they feel like, ‘Hey, I paid my taxes up north, I supported the schools and so forth, and I don’t really want to see high taxes down here in Florida.”