The Republican National Committee dinged President Joe Biden for likening former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd to someone who would not “disrespect a waitress.”
While Biden did not directly use the phrase to describe his former Senate colleague, he cited the mistreatment of servers as an example of people who do not “do simple, decent things for ordinary people” in a way that is revealing of their character.
“I’ve never seen Chris, figuratively speaking, walk by anybody,” he said.
The RNC noted years of reports that Dodd and then-Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts had together manhandled a waitress at La Brasserie, a high-end Washington, D.C., restaurant.
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In 1990, GQ described an incident in which “the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair.”
The episode has also long been characterized as the infamous Kennedy-Dodd “waitress sandwich.”
In 2017, a Hartford Courant columnist wrote that a “waitress sandwich” would be too costly for a politician today. But “in 1985,” when the event occurred, “there was no price for the powerful to pay for one.”
Dodd retired from the Senate after the 2010 midterm elections.
Biden was on hand to speak at the dedication of the Dodd Center for Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, named after both the former senator and his late father Thomas Dodd, also a Democratic senator from the state and a Nuremberg prosecutor.
The president mostly used the speech to argue for aggressive promotion of human rights, touting his reversal of many of his predecessor’s policies. Meanwhile, others criticized Biden for the fate of Afghans under Taliban rule after the U.S. withdrawal.
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“We have fewer democracies in the world today than we did 15 years ago,” Biden declared, his voice slowly rising. “Fewer. Not more, fewer.”
