Pam Bondi's road to the Attorney General's Office began with a phone call from Baltimore.
Adam Goodman, a Tampa-based political consultant, had known the Hillsborough County state prosecutor for a decade. And in the summer of 2009, as he surveyed Florida's electoral landscape during a trip up North, he saw an opening in Tallahassee.
"I figured the attorney general race could be a wide-open affair. I called Pam to discuss the idea," Goodman recounted.
"Her response was classic Bondi. She said, 'Me?'" Goodman chuckled.
With Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp already announced and former state administrator Holly Benson ready to jump into the race, Bondi's self-effacing reaction was understandable. Although she had spent 18 years trying high-profile criminal cases, she had no statewide name recognition and had never run for office.
But Goodman was undaunted and, as their 90-minute phone conversation ensued, Bondi began warming to his political instincts. What followed would make history.
Goodman -- along with Tampa Bay businesswoman Kathleen Shanahan and attorney Martin Garcia -- would form the nucleus of a leadership team that helped Bondi win the GOP primary and blow away Democrat Dan Gelber in the 2011 general election.
Each of the three brought specific skill sets to the task.
Garcia, founder of Pinehill Capital Partners in Tampa, had known Bondi professionally for 15 years. That lawyerly connection grew more personal when Bondi started dating a good friend of his, Greg Henderson.
As the only attorney on the team, Garcia said he played a "minor role" as it pertained to legal policy.
"We were seeking to elect an honest and qualified candidate," he said.
In October 2009, Garcia introduced Bondi to Shanahan, a former chief of staff for Gov. Jeb Bush and a well-connected Republican businesswoman who is CEO of WRScompass, an environmental construction and remediation firm.
Shanahan immediately saw the possibilities in Bondi.
"In the macro political world, people wanted new voices and resented insiders making decisions that only benefited themselves," said Shanahan.
Where Shanahan saw Kottkamp vulnerable to charges of excess travel expenses and Benson as a job-hopping bureaucrat, she viewed Bondi as a fresh face with no baggage.
"She wasn't some fly-by-night attorney. She was trying death-penalty cases and was the No. 2 lawyer in the state attorney's office," Shanahan noted.
Eventually, the Garcia-Goodman-Shanahan team, along with policy and communications specialist Kim Kirtley, another Tampa player, began meeting more than once a week to discuss policy, strategy, governance and management of the campaign.
"There was significant debate and disagreement, which led to very good decisions that ultimately were reached most of the time through consensus," Garcia recalled.
Bondi's kitchen cabinet helped guide her through a tough campaign, that included a scorching public letter from pro-life attorney John Stemberger, who impugned Bondi for living out of wedlock with Henderson and for being -- gasp! -- a former Democrat.
"The Stemberger letter rocked everyone back. Pam created a steel resolve to weather this kind of nonsense," Goodman recalled.
"Her normal attitude would have been to fight back. But the thinking was that a backlash would set in. She learned restraint."
Meantime -- as Shanahan predicted -- Bondi emerged as a grass-roots and tea party favorite. Brett Doster, a Tallahassee-based GOP strategist who had signed on to the campaign as political director, noted the significance of Bondi winning a straw poll at the RPOF Convention in February.
"We went on a march from there, winning 95 percent of the straw polls that followed," Doster said.
Grass-roots enthusiasm for Bondi proved crucial as each of the three Republican candidates struggled for money and media exposure. Early polls showed a tight three-way race, with many voters still undecided.
Shanahan helped prime the partisan pump with her statewide corporate and political connections.
"Without her credibility early in this campaign, our success would not have been possible. She was the chairman of the team and we could not have prevailed without her," Garcia said.
Complementing Shanahan's portfolio, Goodman, president of the Victory Group consulting firm, added a knack "for developing and delivering a message with an appreciation for the audience we were seeking to reach in the campaign," Garcia observed.
And Kirtley, he said, tied it all together.
"Kim is simply the smartest political policy person I have ever met. She was able to listen and engage in debate with the leadership team and synthesize the debate in a manner that resulted in building a consensus among a leadership team with very strong personalities," Garcia said.
"She really brought all of us together on many issues where we would not have otherwise reached consensus."
To bolster Bondi's legal team, Doster reached out to Carlos Munizin the spring of 2010. An attorney with GrayRobinson in Tallahassee, Muniz had been in and out of government for years. Like Shanahan, Muniz had served in the Jeb Bush administration. Subsequently, he was deputy chief of staff for House speakers Marco Rubio and Larry Cretul.
Muniz is staying with Bondi as deputy attorney general and chief of staff -- cementing a philosophical and political link to the Bush circle.
Goodman, whom Doster calls the "Godfather" of the campaign, knew Bondi had what it took -- even before she did.
While he served as her "personal coach" -- helping to write the opening and closing remarks in the first televised primary debate -- Goodman said Bondi began attracting the broader attention and support of the Republican base.
By most accounts, Bondi won that Orlando debate. She subsequently garnered a late primary endorsement from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, which helped elevate Bondi over her GOP rivals.
Unlike prototypical politicians who rely on advisers for their policy positions, Bondi comes by her views independently, Goodman said.
"Her position against Obamacare wasn't political. She read as much as she possibly could on the issue so she could represent the state," he said.
Bondi's grasp of the state's legal battle against the federal health-care law was displayed in an op-ed article she wrote for the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday -- the day after she took office.
"What Florida and the rest of the country will see is someone who does her homework and can bring people together in a disarming way," Goodman predicted.
None of the original leadership troika of Garcia, Goodman and Shanahan (who also served on Rick Scott's transition advisory committee) will have any formal role in the Attorney General's Office. Their "jobs" effectively ended with Bondi's election.
But the Tampa trio remains open, accessible and committed to their candidate.
"She will be an interesting conservative," Goodman concluded.
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Reach Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
