COLIN MCENROE
Ned shows up smiling in Biden’s panic room
Gov. Ned Lamont’s decision to endorse Joe Biden feels like the equivalent of taking an unadventurous eater to the best Asian fusion restaurant in New York and watching him order chicken chow mein.
You: “Live a little. Try the tulsi gabbard. And the way they do the buttigieg here is amazing. How about if I order the betobeto noodles as a starter and we share them?”
Your friend: “The chick-en chow mein is what I want.”
Lamont probably didn’t have much choice. Biden visited Hartford during Lamont’s relatively close race against Bob Stefanowski. That makes Ned Enzo, the baker’s soninlaw who got his visa through Don Corleone. The Don is in the hospital, and the terrified Enzo has to stand next to Michael, pretending to be packing, when Sollozzo’s henchmen show up.
That feels like a tortured analogy. The point is, Ned is in no position to refuse to help someone who helped him so recently.
Over in Biden’s camp, it has been a week of mild panic. The debate did not go well. He had been sitting on a balloon of roughly 30 points, and, in the polls that followed the debate, the air went rushing out of that balloon. Mid20s. Low20s. He needs to stop the bleeding.
“My kingdom for some endorsements!” he cries.
Endorsements are mostly meaningless, but it’s good to have some anyway so you can send them out into space, like those oddly shaped fighters the Empire always releases to attack the Rebel Alliance fleet. (OK, they’re called TIE Fighters. Please don’t email me, nerd-walkers.)
One problem for Biden was that he had already announced bajillions of endorsements, including George R.R. Martin, Michelle Kwan and Rob Reiner. How does that not guarantee the White House? So his people may have had to scrap around to find some new ones.
Having been staggered by a Kamala Harris punch related to busing, Biden especially needed endorsements from black leaders. He got one from Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. (Phew!)
A more interesting drama involved the Rev. Frantz Whitfield. Most people have not heard of this man, but he is the pastor of a large, mostly black Baptist congregation in Waterloo, Iowa, which (at 15 percent) has the highest percentage of black citizens of any Iowa city.
As presidential candidates fan out across Iowa, black Iowa Democrats are suddenly like Teslas or kidney transplants. There aren’t enough, and everybody wants them. Whitfield has candidates swarming over him like puppies at a dog shelter. He recently posted a collage of pictures of him with seven major presidential contenders. Also Kirsten Gillibrand. Kidding! The other day, he had a nearmiss as Bill de Blasio showed up at his church minutes after Beto O’Rourke departed.
Last week, Whitfield tweeted ominously that the debate “changes everything.” He would have to go “back to the drawing board” about his choice for president. He also retweeted a civil rights activist who had written “Biden is going to have to WORK HARD to come back from what happened tonight.” Ruhroh.
But then ... something happened. On Wednesday, Whitfield introduced Biden at a Waterloo event and endorsed him. I assume Whitfield might, on some day in the hypothetical future, become secretary of defense.
Sandwiched between Bottoms and Whitfield, one of People magazine’s 100 Whitest People in America, Ned Lamont, also endorsed Biden. But when you look at it in that context, it seems like even less of an event.
Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes endorsed Harris and did so by writing an online oped on the Essence magazine site. This was a little bit of a surprise. Hayes has shown herself to be a rather careful firstyear congresswoman, and her oped relied heavily on the debatenight clash between Harris and Biden as a rationale. She sees Harris’ seizing of the stage, the mic, the spotlight as a durable, defining moment.
She’s probably right. But it’s a long, long campaign. Objects seen in the mirror right now may seem larger than they are. Defining moments tend to come later, closer to the major primary dates. The only recent Connecticut endorsement I can remember that (maybe) mattered came very early in 2008 when U.S. Rep. John Larson decided Barack Obama was the real thing.
Larson and fellow congressman Chris Murphy began working for Obama, and quickly they were joined by Rosa DeLauro. It culminated with the February rally in Hartford where Ted Kennedy introduced Obama to a cheering crowd. Later that month, legendary civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis switched his endorsement from Hillary Clinton to Obama.
My guess is that this season will proceed in a somewhat similar way. Things — endorsements, rallies, speeches, debates, gaffes, dropouts — will happen, because things do. And they will seem to matter at the time.
But the Iowa caucuses — which ended both Biden and Chris Dodd in 2008 — are not until Feb. 3, 2020. The ground will shift in important ways in the first three months of next year.
Right now, not so much. Unless George R.R. Martin switches to Andrew Yang. Then all bets are off.