Still in disguise

To the editor,

Bobby Valentine, the former New York Mets manager, mailed me a campaign flier requesting my vote. I’ll confess: I’m a Mets fan. And I sure enjoyed him the night an umpire tossed him from a game and he later sneaked back into the dugout wearing a fake mustache.

But I’m also a Stamford fan. And I find it hard to square Bobby Valentine the mayoral candidate with Bobby Valentine the city’s former director of public health and safety — the Bobby V who, on the August 2011 night Hurricane Irene battered Stamford, prioritized broadcasting a baseball game from Arlington, Texas, over fulfilling his municipal responsibility to oversee the safety of his fellow citizens. He left Stamford in the midst of a crisis. He was Ted Cruz before there was a Ted Cruz.

Valentine claims to be “unaffiliated” with either political party. Yet he is endorsed by the Stamford Republican Town Committee and by Joe Corsello, the party’s candidate, who dropped out of the race to make room for Valentine. Two of Bobby V’s biggest financial contributors are Linda McMahon, Donald Trump’s former cabinet secretary, and Anthony Scaramucci, briefly, his White House communications director.

My guess: Valentine, a former registered Republican, figured his best chance of winning in majority-Democrat Stamford was to market himself as “unaffiliated.” And so he has obscured his one-time political identity in the same, sloppy manner he attempted to hide his baseball identity in that long-ago Mets game.

What’s that line about a sucker being born every minute?

Ron Berler is the author of “Raising the Curve: A Year Inside One of America’s 45,000 Failing Public Schools.”