The Eye

Bill McCollum may not be the only Republican in the Florida gubernatorial race for long.

The state's Agriculture commissioner, tough-guy namesake Charles Bronson, is none too pleased that leading state party officials -- including Chairman Jim Greer -- tried to anoint McCollum, the state's attorney general, as the GOP's nominee as soon as he announced his candidacy on Monday morning.

"I am very concerned about the whole idea of closing down primaries," Bronson said in a telephone interview with CQPolitics on Monday afternoon. "This idea that one person seems to have the only answer to the situation, I just don't believe that."

Bronson said he will make a decison on whether to run "hopefully by the end of the week."

"His ideas and mine might be a lot the same and it could be there are some different issues out there, but you won't know that unless there's a race," he said.