Just 20 miles divide Bridgeport and Greenwich, two cities on Connecticut’s commuter coastline. But Greenwich, the closer to New York, is $70,000 richer in per capita income. It’s almost twice as white and more than nine times safer than Bridgeport, where deadly drive-by shootings are routine. And now, in a tale of two Connecticuts, the mayor of Bridgeport, a convicted felon on a comeback tour, is running a longshot campaign in the Democratic gubernatorial primary against a millionaire businessman who went to Exeter and Harvard and has lived in Greenwich most of his life. Mayor Joe Ganim wants to take down Ned Lamont, the runaway favorite, who easily secured the endorsement of the state party convention last weekend.
Lamont, 64-year-old heir to an early J. P. Morgan chairman, made his personal fortune in cable television and a name for himself stealing the Democratic nomination in 2006 from hawkish Senator Joe Lieberman, who then ran as an independent and won. The establishment candidate this time around, Lamont netted nearly 87 percent of the floor vote at the Democratic convention in Hartford on Saturday, May 19, ceding the slim remainder—half of them from the state’s depressed post-industrial cities—to his one unrelenting opponent. Lamont campaign staffers told me they believed Ganim might drop out as soon as Monday. Ganim staffers said I must have garbled the quotation.
