PANAMA CITY — After more than four decades of service as a politician, advocate and private-practice attorney, George Sheldon feels like his work is not done yet.
“What has happened somehow in this country is we have become so divided and no one wants to find common ground,” the Democratic candidate for attorney general said in a News Herald editorial board meeting Oct. 10.
Sheldon said the priorities of his Republican opponent Pam Bondi, who’s running for a second term, have been misplaced. The strongest legs of Bondi’s campaign include shutting down pill mills and putting pressure on perpetrators fueling Florida’s reputation as a hotbed for human trafficking.
Sheldon hopes to address a wider array of injustice after the Nov. 4 primary election. Sheldon and Bondi will be on the ballot with Libertarian Bill Wohlsifer.
Sheldon and Bondi are the two strongest contenders at this point and on opposite ends of the spectrum on some issues. For instance, Bondi had consistently defended the state’s ban on same-sex marriage and been unclear about her view of adoption by same-sex couples.
Sheldon was more straightforward with his perspective.
“I do not have a problem with gays fostering and adopting children,” he said. “In situations like that, you ought to be looking at their background and whether it’s a safe home.”
Keeping children in nurturing environments is something Sheldon said he’d championed tirelessly as secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families.
To Sheldon, a parent’s sexual orientation is not the baseline for determining how children would be treated.
“What I learned about child abuse is most of it is about substance abuse and mental health issues,” he said.
On other health-related issues, Sheldon supports medical marijuana, women’s right to make their own reproductive decisions and the expansion of Medicaid.
“There’s no doubt that Obamacare has some things that need to be corrected,” he said. “Long term, you’ve got to deal with health insurance. They’re not in the business to lose money.”
He said other keys to overcoming health expenditures would be to increase attention on Medicaid fraud and making access to early screening and primary care providers a reality for more people.
“We need to start thinking about health and not disease,” he said. “The vast majority of health care costs are for the sickest of the sick.”
In addition to beating health disparities, Sheldon said Floridians will be better poised to take care of themselves once poverty and its related issues are addressed.
Since it surfaced that Bay County has one of the highest concentrations of gang presence in the state, Sheldon said coordinated efforts are essential to defusing gang activity.
“What’s driving that is disaffected youth not finishing high school,” he said. “Part of that is you’ve got to deal with education.”
To Sheldon, economic depression puts young people on the fast track to the criminal justice system, especially if children are off to a rough start in the first three years of life or deficient in basic reading skills at the third-grade level.
He said fewer children would turn to illegal activities if more opportunity for education were available to pave the way for better choices.
“Ultimately, you’ve got to get people to deal with their own problems,” he said. “You can’t do it from Washington.”