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      Bobby Valentino, Ex-Mets Manager, Wants to Be the Mayor of Stamford

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      The mayor’s race in Stamford has been flooded with money and intrigue, thanks largely to the flamboyant presence of Bobby Valentine, a first-time candidate and former Mets and Red Sox manager.In Stamford, the second-largest city in Connecticut, a province of mixed baseball loyalties lying between New York and Boston, one of the last remaining names on the ballot for mayor this fall is more familiar to sports fans than to municipal policy wonks: Bobby Valentine.It’s a name that needs little introduction in this city of 135,000 people, which has emerged from its 20th-century role as a financial services exurb to become a magnet for apartment developers and tech companies. All through Stamford, lawns and traffic islands are carpeted with the campaign signs of Mr. Valentine, who managed the New York Mets from 1996 to 2002, including a World Series loss to the Yankees, and lasted one tumultuous season as the skipper of the Boston Red Sox.That Bobby Valentine, the former ESPN commentator whose managerial career took him from the employ of George W. Bush with the Texas Rangers to the Chiba Lotte Marines in Japan. And yes, the same Bobby Valentine who once disguised himself with a fake mustache in the Mets dugout after being ejected from a game. He also claims to have invented the sandwich wrap.His outsize presence as a first-time candidate who circumvented the party establishment (he will appear on the ballot as a “petitioning candidate”) has generated intrigue in the race far beyond Stamford and made it one of Connecticut’s most expensive municipal races this year. As of the start of October, the candidates had raised close to $1 million and already spent more than four times what was spent on the mayor’s race in 2017. This puts them on pace to break the $1.3 million record set in 2013.This has brought a great deal of attention, especially to Mr. Valentine, who has never held an elective office but is trying to pull together disparate voter blocs in Stamford, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2 to 1 but there are nearly as many unaffiliated voters as registered Democrats.There are doubters, as Mr. Valentine, 71, a longtime Stamford restaurant owner, acknowledged on Oct. 12 in the first mayoral debate, saying that people told him he was trying to do the impossible.“I said, ‘Again?’” Mr. Valentine recounted to an audience of about 150 people at a banquet hall for the debate. “When I was told there was no way of winning in Stamford, Conn., because the voters were dumb and they were lazy, that was my call to action, to make something happen. What I want to make happen is to bring our community together. Not that our potholes are red or they’re blue. Not that our schools are D’s or they’re R’s.”His opponent is Caroline Simmons, a four-term state representative who defeated the mayor, David Martin, in the Democratic primary in September. Ms. Simmons, 35, who graduated from Harvard, previously worked on the Women’s Business Development Council in Stamford and was a special projects director for the Department of Homeland Security before that.Caroline Simmons, center, the Democratic candidate for mayor, canvassing in North Stamford this month.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesYet despite her résumé, Ms. Simmons finds herself battling a celebrity candidate with high name recognition.“It’s definitely a challenge,” Ms. Simmons said on a recent Saturday while knocking on doors and introducing herself to voters in North Stamford. “I have some friends in Boston, and they’re like, ‘What, you’re running against Bobby V?’ ”In the 2020 census, Stamford surpassed New Haven in population having attracted millennials to turnkey apartment buildings along its once-industrial waterfront and tech companies, like the job-search giant Indeed.But with growth has come high housing prices, on top of aging infrastructure and a mold crisis in public schools, all of which has been amplified during the mayoral contest.Ms. Simmons, despite her youth, is clearly the establishment candidate. She doesn’t have Mr. Valentine’s profile or history, but does have the Democratic machine in her corner. Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut campaigned in September for Ms. Simmons, whom he endorsed. On Thursday, Ms. Simmons announced that Barack Obama had given her his endorsement.Ms. Simmons also has the upper hand when it comes to ballot placement. Her name will appear on the top line as the Democratic nominee and also the third line, having been cross-endorsed by the Independent Party.Mr. Valentine’s name will appear on Line F, the equivalent to batting sixth on a lineup card, because he is not affiliated with a political party.Famous donors have gravitated toward both candidates. Bette Midler, Michael Douglas and Rita Wilson gave to Ms. Simmons. So did Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary.Two of Mr. Valentine’s most prominent donors also dismissed him as a baseball manager: Mr. Bush with the Rangers and Larry Lucchino, the former president and chief executive of the Red Sox. The former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent gave to Mr. Valentine, who received the endorsement of police union leaders and the Republican candidate, who dropped out of the race in September.In Stamford, Democrats have controlled the mayor’s office for all but four of the past 26 years. For 14 of those years, the office was held by Dannel P. Malloy, who went on to become a two-term Connecticut governor.But Chris Russo, a former WFAN radio host who has his own channel on SiriusSM satellite radio, Mad Dog Sports Radio, thinks Mr. Valentine has the edge.“I’d be surprised if he didn’t win,” Mr. Russo, who lives in neighboring New Canaan, Conn., said in an interview. “He is Mr. Stamford, and he has been here forever. He’s got a lot to lose. If he goes in there and doesn’t do a good job, it’s going to hurt his legacy.”Mr. Valentine appeared on Mr. Russo’s show on Sept. 11 to reflect on the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, which occurred when he was managing the Mets. Mr. Russo described Mr. Valentine as “glib,” smart and a “young 70,” but acknowledged that people’s perceptions may differ, especially for those not from Stamford.“He can be a little over the top,” Mr. Russo said. “Again, Bobby’s quirky.”Bobby Valentine in 1998 during his tenure as the manager of the New York Mets.Al Bello/Getty ImagesIn one video that emerged online this year, Mr. Valentine appeared to inadvertently record himself while his dog defecated on someone’s lawn and he hurried away. The video has since been removed from YouTube.Ellen Ashkin, 70, a retired public-school teacher who lives in North Stamford and is a registered Democrat, told Ms. Simmons that she would vote for her. As she greeted Ms. Simmons on her doorstep, Ms. Ashkin was snide about Mr. Valentine’s qualifications and his ubiquitous campaign paraphernalia.“Bobby Valentine, really?” Ms. Ashkin said. “Honest to God. The signs are everywhere.”Ms. Ashkin added in an interview that Ms. Simmons faced a unique challenge.“The name recognition of Valentine is kind of scary,” she said.Ms. Simmons is married to Art Linares, a former Republican state senator who proposed to her in a full-page ad in The Stamford Advocate. She is campaigning while pregnant with their third child. She was raised in Greenwich — which the rest of the state regards as somewhat patrician — and moved to Stamford as an adult, which Mr. Valentine’s campaign has sought to exploit. Mr. Valentine frequently tells voters that his family arrived in Stamford in 1910.“I don’t think we consider her a Stamfordite,” Daniel M. McCabe, a lawyer and former longtime Stamford G.O.P. chairman, said before Mr. Valentine and Ms. Simmons debated for the first time.Ms. Simmons said in an interview that she has a proven track record of delivering results for Stamford in the Legislature.“I’ve known my constituents for years, and the issues that they care about,” she said.Early this month, Mr. Valentine regaled about 60 residents of Edgehill, a luxury retirement community, with stories about growing up as a star athlete in Stamford and being the first foreigner to manage a Japan Series winner. He called himself the “protruding nail” that the Japanese “wanted to hammer down.”Mr. Valentine making his case this month at Edgehill, a retirement community in Stamford.Desiree Rios for The New York Times“I was the manager of the year, and I was replaced as manager,” Mr. Valentine said of his career.Before entering the mayor’s race in May, Mr. Valentine spent eight years as the executive director of athletics at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, which had grown from a commuter school to the second-largest Catholic university in New England after Boston College. He boasted that he had presided over a $25 million budget at the university — a fraction of Stamford’s $615 million city and school budget. He has taken a leave of absence from the job to campaign.Mr. Valentine also emphasized his tenure a decade ago as Stamford’s public safety director in the administration of Mayor Michael Pavia, a Republican. Mr. Valentine likes to tell the story of how, when a major sewer pipe broke in 2011, inundating part of the city with millions of gallons of sewage, he went door to door, telling residents to evacuate to hotels.But Ms. Simmons has seized on Mr. Valentine’s absence from Stamford during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 — he traveled to Texas for his “Sunday Night Baseball” broadcasting duties on ESPN, a job he kept while being public safety director. A campaign mailer for Ms. Simmons noted, “When Stamford needed Bobby Valentine, he looked out for himself instead.”Dan Miller, Mr. Valentine’s campaign manager, rejected the criticism in an interview, saying that Mr. Valentine was in constant communication with city officials during the storm and had been transparent about his weekend broadcasting commitments when he took the job. Mr. Valentine offered to take no salary, but when that was not allowed donated his entire $10,000 pay to the Boys & Girls Club, Mr. Miller said.Ms. Simmons stood by her criticism.“He abandoned the people of Stamford to go to a baseball game,” she said.Still, this is as heated as it gets between the two candidates. They exchanged few barbs in the first debate, where they vowed to eradicate mold in the schools, fix potholes, cut red tape and recruit new businesses to the city.Ann Mandel, an Edgehill resident who helped to organize Mr. Valentine’s visit there, escorted him through a temperature-screening kiosk and into a community room where dozens of seniors in masks sat spaced apart. Ms. Mandel, a former elected official in Darien, Conn., told him that he could “work the crowd.”“Stamford,” Ms. Mandel told audience, “has never seen a mayoral race like this.” More

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      Joseph D. Duffey, 88, Dies; Apostle of Liberalism and Humanities

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJoseph D. Duffey, 88, Dies; Apostle of Liberalism and HumanitiesHis 1970 Senate race in Connecticut energized antiwar progressives. He later served two presidents and headed universities in Massachusetts and Washington.Joseph D. Duffey in 1969, when he was chairman of the liberal advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action. He ran for the Senate the next year. Credit…Denver Post, via Getty ImagesMarch 3, 2021, 4:51 p.m. ETJoseph D. Duffey, a coal miner’s son and ordained minister whose antiwar campaign for the United States Senate from Connecticut in 1970 galvanized a generation of campus liberals, and who later served as a cultural arbiter in the Carter and Clinton administrations and presided over two major universities, died on Feb. 25 at his home in Washington. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his son, Michael.A self-described “hillbilly and a Baptist” from West Virginia, Dr. Duffey had organized Freedom Rides for civil rights in the South and protests against the Vietnam War before seeking the Senate seat from Connecticut. He lost, but his insurgent candidacy jolted the Democratic Party organization and catapulted him into appointive jobs, thanks to two other “hillbilly Baptists” who happened to become presidents of the United States.Jimmy Carter named him assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs in early 1977, and later that year Dr. Duffey was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a post he held until 1982, into the Reagan years.In 1993, Mr. Clinton recruited him to be director of the United States Information Agency, which promotes American policy abroad. He was its last director as an independent agency; it was absorbed into the State Department in 1999.Dr. Duffey was chancellor of the University of Massachusetts from 1982 to 1991 and chancellor of American University in Washington from 1991 to 1993.He entered the political fray after succeeding John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, as chairman of the liberal advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action. In 1970 he was going up against John M. Bailey’s Connecticut Democratic machine.Mr. Bailey supported Alphonsus J. Donahue, a wealthy Stamford businessman, to fill the seat that had been held since 1958 by Senator Thomas J. Dodd, a fellow Democrat who had been censured in the Senate for diverting campaign funds for personal use and repudiated by party leaders when he sought re-election to a third term. (His son Christopher Dodd was later elected to the Senate from the state.)Attracting an array of boldface-name supporters, including the actor Paul Newman, who had a home in Westport, Conn., Dr. Duffey upset Mr. Donahue and a state legislator to win the nomination.Dr. Duffey, with the actor Paul Newman, spoke to Connecticut delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Mr. Duffey was spearheading his state’s campaign for Eugene McCarthy, the liberal, antiwar senator who was seeking the party’s presidential nomination.Credit…Associated PressMounted two years after the failed progressive presidential candidacy of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy in 1968, Dr. Duffey’s campaign energized campus progressives, including a young Bill Clinton, then a student at Yale Law School. They embraced Dr. Duffey as an honest broker who might bridge the gap between disaffected liberal Democrats and blue-collar voters who had switched to the Republican Party and helped put Richard M. Nixon in the White House in 1968.“At a time when young people were so desperately hungry for honesty and conviction, he met that moment with grace and eloquence,’’ Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and a former law school classmate of Mr. Clinton’s, said of Dr. Duffey this week.But Dr. Duffey’s campaign was dealt a setback when Mr. Dodd entered the general election race that fall as an independent. Mr. Dodd wound up splitting the Democratic vote, allowing the Republican nominee, Lowell P. Weicker, to slip into office with less than 42 percent. (Mr. Dodd died less than seven months later.)“In the fall of 1970, I missed about half of my law school classes trying to help get Joe Duffey elected to the Senate,” Mr. Clinton said in a statement. “There were so many of us who were drawn to his deep commitment to peace, economic fairness, and civil rights. Joe lost the election, but he left us all proud, wiser in the ways of politics, and richer in lifelong friends, including Joe himself.”A bumper sticker from Dr. Duffey’s 1970 Senate campaign. Emilio Q. Daddario, a former Connecticut congressman, was the Democratic nominee for governor. Both men lost. Joseph Daniel Duffey was born on July 1, 1932 in Huntington, W. Va., in the western foothills of the Appalachians. His father, Joseph Ivanhoe Duffey, lost a leg in a mining accident and became a barber. His mother, Ruth (Wilson) Duffey, a telegraph operator, died when Joe was 13.Raised in the Baptist church and later ordained as a Congregational minister, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Marshall University in Huntington in 1954; a bachelor of divinity degree from Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts (now the Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School) in 1957; a master’s from Yale Divinity School in 1963; and a doctorate from what is now the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut in 1969.In 1952, Dr. Duffey married Patricia Fortney, whom he had met at a Baptist youth convention; they divorced in 1973. A year later, he married Anne Wexler, who ran his 1970 campaign, became an aide to President Carter and then a prominent Washington political operative and lobbyist; she died in 2009.In addition to his son Michael, from his first marriage, he is survived by his partner, Marian Burros, a former food writer for The New York Times; two stepsons, Daniel and David Wexler; two sisters, Ida Ruth Plymale and Patrica Duffey Keesee; and four grandchildren.Dr. Duffey brought his progressive sensibilities to his job as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Mr. Carter. He defined the job to The Times in 1977 as awarding federal grants to support “disciplines whose function and purpose are self‐discovery and the exploration of the human experience.” And he acknowledged that he had encountered flak for focusing on what he called “neglected areas of research,” like the study of women and minority groups in America and the history of the Middle East.His background as chief administrative officer for the American Association of University Professors from 1974 to 1976 helped pave the way for his appointments to the chancellorships of the University of Massachusetts and American University.As a product of the antiwar movement, Dr. Duffey cautioned against romanticizing the era, recalling it as a time of deep national division.But at a reunion of some of his 1970 campaign volunteers in 1993, after Mr. Clinton had risen to the White House, he reminded them that while it had taken Mr. Clinton’s election to reunite them, they should hold fast to their liberal principles and continue to work for what could bring them together again.“Looking at you, I’m sure there’s another president here,” Dr. Duffey said. “And I’m sure we’ll all be together again when she is inaugurated.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      John Oliver says he'll donate $55,000 if Connecticut city names sewage plant after him

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      John Oliver has upped the stakes in his spat with the Connecticut town of Danbury, offering to donate $55,000 to charity if officials there make good on a promise to name their sewage treatment plant after him.The Republican mayor, Mark Boughton, said last week Danbury would rename the facility the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant, in response to an expletive-filled rant against the city on a recent episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.“Why? Because it’s full of crap just like you, John,” Boughton said, though he later said he’d been joking.Oliver’s first Danbury diatribe came on his 16 August show, in which he explored racial disparities in the jury selection process, citing problems in Hartford and New Britain, other Connecticut cities.Apparently at random, the bespectacled Anglo-American funny man then went off on Danbury.“If you’re going to forget a town in Connecticut,” Oliver said: “Why not forget Danbury? Because, and this is true, fuck Danbury!”He also said “Danbury, Connecticut, can eat my whole ass” and added: “If you’re from there, you have a standing invite to come get a thrashing from John Oliver, children included, fuck you.”It wasn’t clear what prompted the outburst but this Sunday Oliver said he was surprised and delighted by the city’s response. After playing a video of Boughton saying it was just a joke, however, another rant ensued.“Wait, so you’re not doing it? Aw, fuck you, Danbury. You had the first good idea in your city’s history and you chickened out on the follow-through. What a classic Danbury move.“Listen, I didn’t know that I wanted my name on your fucking factory but now that you floated it as an option, it is all that I want.”Oliver offered to donate $55,000 to charities, including $25,000 to the Connecticut Food Bank, if the city renamed the plant. If not, he said he would make donations to “rival” towns including Waterbury and Torrington.Boughton said on Monday city officials planned to respond by the end of the week. He said the council would have to approve any renaming of the sewage plant.“I think it’s very generous and we appreciate that,” the mayor said. “It’s just a great distraction for people to get laughs.” More

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      Coronavirus US live: Trump calls America's 1.52m cases 'a badge of honor', stirring outrage

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      President says number of US cases is good news Trump threatens to withhold funding from Michigan and Nevada over vote by mail Trump suggests hosting G7 in person Florida scientist says she was fired for refusing to change Covid-19 data ‘to support reopen plan’ Coronavirus – latest global updates Get a fresh perspective on America […] More