NUVO (Indianapolis, IN), 12/12/01 (this version restores several minor cuts
made for space reasons in the printed version)

By Steve Sanders

Indiana Secretary of State isn't a glamour job. Its official functions
include overseeing elections, chartering corporations and "preservation of
the state seal." Recent occupants, including Evan Bayh and incumbent Sue
Anne Gilroy, have seen the office mostly as a government budget they could
brag about cutting while they looked for a better job.

It's not immediately clear what Kent Benson, who has announced his
candidacy for the Republican nomination, would see in the position.

Benson, of course, isn't just any small-town ex-jock. The 1973 Mr.
Basketball, he went on to become tournament MVP on IU's undefeated 1976
NCAA championship team. He later spent 11 (undistinguished) seasons in the
NBA.

All this means Benson, 46, who lives near Bedford, can probably expect a
certain amount of support from Hoosiers who figure anybody who played for
Bob Knight could handle some government job. Knight, still stewing like a
jilted wife down in Texas and itching for any excuse to come back and
gripe about IU, would surely campaign for him. Benson's candidacy must
give heartburn to the four nobodies who have previously announced for the
GOP nomination. (Republicans will choose their candidate, who will be the
top of the ticket in 2002, at their convention next summer.)

Earlier this year Benson signed on as president of something called The
Hoosier Project, which he has described blandly as a grassroots group that
seeks to "restore our country's heritage" and "restore excellence back to
government." With a bit of digging, though, the story gets more
interesting.

Hoosier Project's address in a Bloomington office building is an unmarked
suite one door down from the district office of U.S. Rep. John Hostettler
(8th), an ultra conservative Republican who's never quite lived down
having been labeled by a national magazine in 1995 as one of the 10 most
dimwitted members of Congress.

According to state records (helpfully provided by, as it happens, the
Secretary of State's office), the Project was incorporated by Jeff Canada,
a Hostettler staff member currently on leave to help run Benson's
campaign. The name of Jim Banks, a former Hostettler campaign aide,
appears on electronic materials distributed by Hoosiers for Kent Benson.

Benson's bio mostly talks about basketball, though it adds he is "a
renowned speaker who has shared his visions and faith with many groups."
It doesn't mention that those groups have included recruits for Amway, the
pyramid-style home products empire. A 1999 CBS Sportsline report about
Knight alumni noted that Benson "works with Diversified Benefit Services,
a marketing firm affiliated with the Amway Corporation." On a website
devoted to the stories of Amway refugees, a disgruntled former distributor
recounts that at a seminar when he was just getting involved, one of the
first "pins" he met (referring to the lapel pins worn by Amway role
models) was Benson.

Until 1999 Benson, who according to press reports has filed for bankruptcy
in the past and still owes $6,100 in back state taxes, operated
All-American Estate Planning, which was listed at the same Bloomington
address as the Monroe County Taxpayers Association, a cranky
anti-government group that devotes most of its energy to savaging
Bloomington Mayor John Fernandez, a Democratic candidate for the same
office Benson is seeking. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should
note that I'm on the board of a group, the Indiana Stonewall Democrats,
which has held a fund-raiser for Fernandez.)

Last year, after the Monroe County United Way dropped the Boy Scouts over
their anti-gay policies, Benson showed up at a Bloomington scout meeting
alongside Eric Miller, the divorced, childless, bachelor head of the
Indiana "pro-family" group Advance America. Miller was there to present a
check for $18,000 to fill the gap left by United Way.

Benson isn't known for his opinions on election reform or corporate
charters. So unless credible threats emerge against the state seal, one
expects he'll have plenty of time on the trail for jock talk and pieties
about God and public service. Indeed, his web site says Benson "likens
the Hoosier Project to that of developing an undefeated NCAA national
championship team."

If that's the case, it's a team heavy on homophobes, tax haters and "2nd
Amendment patriots," all of whom are featured in Hoosier Project's recent
news releases. A little research on the group's web site turns up lots of
right-wing themes: demands to post the Ten Commandments in public
buildings, a call to "pray for Fort Wayne" so the city wouldn't pass a
gay-rights law, various attacks on the O'Bannon administration and
desultory sermons by Hostettler about Boy Scouts, homosexuals, and the
"fallacy" of church-state separation.

At his announcement last Wednesday, I wanted to ask Benson about such
matters. But Canada hustled him off, saying they were late to another
event. Campaign spokesperson Kim West said Monday it was "fair to assume"
Benson shared Hostettler's philosophy and that he was in sync with Hoosier
Project on issues.

Of course, in the contest for the GOP nomination, right-wing politics will
only help Benson, even if one suspects the former star would rather slap
backs and shoot free throws than talk about human cloning. The general
election may be a different story. Time will tell whether the
God-gays-and-guns wing of Indiana politics has landed a true MVP.