No drama: Affable Ned spoke sense to Biden in call with Democratic governors as others trafficked in delusions.

The political book of the year, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, includes a laudable cameo by Governor Ned Lamont.

Democratic governors attended a July 3rd meeting last summer with a besieged President Joe Biden. The meeting was held in the White House two weeks after Biden’s worst-in-presidential-campaign-history debate in Atlanta. Ten Democratic governors were in the room with Biden, others, including Lamont, joined their colleagues by Zoom.

By then, Biden had no trouble reciting his delusional talking points about the gobsmacking debate disaster. He’d had a cold, he had been traveling too much, and the polls show people don’t care about the state of his health.

Josh Green, Hawaii’s governor and a physician, asked Biden how he was doing and added the guy Green saw on the debate stage wasn’t the Biden he knew.

Some of the governors, according to Tapper and Thompson, were not candid. California Democrat Gavin Newsom “did some rah-racing for Biden; [New York Governor Kathy] Hochul and [Maryland Governor Wes] Moore praised him and said they were all in.” Our Ned was having none of that. “On Zoom,” Thompson and Tapper write, “Connecticut’s ned Lamont affably said, Mr. President, since age is just such an issue right now, front and center, why not just take age off the table and just step aside and swap somebody else in?”

Janet Mills, Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Jared Polis raised concerns about Biden’s November prospects in their states, which Biden won in 2020. Not everyone was given a chance to speak before Vice President Kamala Harris intervened and brought the meeting to its conclusion. “We have to have the president’s back,” quote Harris as announcing. “It’s our fucking democracy at stake.”

But it was Ned Lamont who said what the others either denied or gingerly hinted at. Lamont’s candor was bolstered by a singular dose of credibility. He was the first governor outside of Delaware to endorse Biden in 2019–when not a lot of elected officials were rushing to join the former vice president’s campaign. Biden appreciated that endorsement, according to emails obtained by Daily Ructions after a long battle with Lamont and his office over the release of obvious public records.

Five years later, Lamont did Biden another favor–he told him the truth about his dire prospects.

Eight days later, Representative Jim Himes called on Biden to get out of the race. Himes reached his conclusion, Original Sin reports, because the debate was bad enough, but worse was “the realization that the Democrats had so lowered the bar that when Biden strung four sentences together in a cogent way, they all celebrated.”

Published May 21, 2025.