Ned Lamont spent eight years getting softballs. Now the questions are getting harder, and the governor’s patience -- and his hands -- are running out.

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Let me start with a tape. Not a rumor, not a “sources say.” A tape.

It’s a sunny fall day. Leaves all over the ground. A reporter from the Connecticut Centinal walks up with a camera to the Governor of Connecticut and asks him a question. She wants to know about his campaign. Specifically, she asks why Rob Blanchard -- the man who left the governor’s office this spring to go work on the re-election campaign -- “didn’t follow the police directions” when he got pulled over after the debate.

The governor starts to answer. “This doesn’t look like it was a fair deal to me,” he says.

That’s it. That’s the question. You can think it’s a fair question or you can think it’s a cheap shot. Doesn’t matter. It’s a question.

And then you see the governor backhand the camera. The picture jumps. And you hear her say it, right there on the recording: “Wait a minute, why did you touch my camera? You’re not supposed to be touching my camera.”

She says, “I was asking a question.”

Thirty-seven seconds. The Centinal gave me the video, and I posted it Saturday morning. And folks, I want you to watch it yourself before anybody tells you what you saw. I’m not going to tell you he hit her. He didn’t hit her. What the video shows is a sitting governor backhanding a reporter’s camera because he didn’t like what she was asking. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.

Now somebody already showed up in my replies to say it’s “a huge reach” to call that an attack. Okay. So let me ask the question the other way around. If a Republican governor put his hand on a woman reporter’s camera in the middle of a question, what would the headline be in Hartford on Monday? You know. I know. Everybody reading this knows. It would not be “Governor Gently Redirects Lens.”

And then the governor’s side answered. Not with an apology. Not with “I shouldn’t have touched the camera.” With this. I’m going to give it to you exactly as they put it out:

“For the last several months, political provocateurs have shown up to disrupt the Governor’s events, both official and campaign. While presenting themselves as journalists, these individuals have been seen supporting Republicans...It’s no surprise that Ryan Fazio, whose campaign has failed to gain traction with voters, is now desperately trying to manufacture any sign of life by deploying these faux journalists to harass the Governor, get uncomfortably close to him, and shove cameras in his face.”

Read that again. Slowly.

Provocateurs. Faux journalists. Harass. That’s what you are, according to the Governor of Connecticut, if you show up at a public event and ask him a question he doesn’t like. Not a reporter. Not a citizen. A prop sent by the other guy.

Notice what’s not in there. There’s not one word about the question. Not one word about Rob Blanchard or the police directions. Not one word about why the governor’s hand ended up on that camera. When you can’t answer the question, you go after the person asking it. That’s the whole playbook, and now it’s in writing.

And “shove cameras in his face”? Governor, it’s a press availability. That’s where the cameras go. That’s the job. You don’t get to call a woman holding a camera a harasser because she held it while asking you something. And you sure don’t get to decide who counts as a journalist based on who you think she votes for. Last I checked, the First Amendment doesn’t come with a party registration form.

I’ll say this plainly, because I’m one of the people standing in that room. I’ve asked this man questions for months. I’ve asked about his own words. I’ve asked about a police warrant in a case where two people died. If that makes me a provocateur, then every reporter worth a dime in this country is a provocateur. That statement isn’t a defense. It’s a confession of how he sees all of us.

Here’s the thing. This didn’t come out of nowhere. I’ve been standing in front of Ned Lamont with a microphone for a while now, and I’ve watched the temperature go up every single time.

Go back to the spring. The governor told reporters that people of color in Connecticut might be afraid to vote. Think about that for a second. The governor of the state, the man in charge of the state, saying a whole group of his own citizens are too scared to walk into a polling place. So I asked him. I said, “Governor, a couple of weeks back, you said that people of color, perhaps, maybe all things being equal, may not want to vote because they’re scared. What do you mean by that? What people of color are afraid to vote?”

His first words were, “I don’t know about that.”

You don’t know about that? It was your quote.

Then he talked about ICE “hanging around some of the voting areas” and the Trump administration asking for voter rolls. So I asked, afraid based on the color of their skin? “Potentially.” I asked for the evidence. “Pardon?” I asked again. And then I asked the question that actually matters to me as a Black man in this state. When you say people of color, are you talking about Black people too? Would Black people be afraid? Or did you really mean Hispanics and just work around the edges?

The governor’s answer on the tape: “I think you’re over-reading.” So I read his own quote back to him. And the governor of Connecticut looked at me and told me to “relax.”

Over-reading. I read your own sentence back to you, Governor. That’s not over-reading. That’s reading.

Then came the summer. And the summer was ugly.

July 13, an off-duty Bridgeport police officer, Cooper Whiteside, and Brittany Islami, a mother of three, were killed on Sugar Hollow Road in Danbury. The woman charged in that crash had an ICE detainer lodged against her. And the arrest warrant -- the Danbury police warrant, signed and entered into the court record -- said police confirmed she had a valid driver’s license tied to a New Britain address.

That one detail sent the whole state into a tailspin. Was she licensed? Was she registered? Who was who? And instead of saying “our warrant got it wrong,” the people in charge went after the press. The governor blamed “misinformation pushed in a rush to advance a political agenda.” The Secretary of the State put out a video about “reckless” reporting.

Meanwhile, Danbury’s own police chief told Dan Haar of Hearst that when they ran the name and date of birth, the New Britain woman came up. In other words, the confusion started with the warrant. And when the governor’s own staff emailed each other about it, his communications director wrote that “the confusion basically stems from Danbury PD.” That’s from records obtained under FOI and published by the Connecticut Centinal.

So on August 5, I asked the governor about it. Face to face. The warrant hadn’t been corrected. And he told me it was “unprofessional for the press to jump to conclusions” based on what was written in the warrant.

Stop right there. The warrant is the official document. It’s what the police swore to. If the press can’t rely on a signed arrest warrant, what exactly are we supposed to rely on? A press release from the guy who’s running for re-election?

And when I kept pushing, he said he’d had “enough” of the “provocative” questions.

Provocative. A question about a police warrant in a case where two people are dead is provocative. Got it. Write that down, because that’s the moment the mask slipped a little. The problem wasn’t the question. The problem was that somebody asked it.

Then October. You saw the video from the private Democratic event, the one that ended up in Lee Elci’s ad. That’s the governor calling Lee Elci -- a 22-year radio guy now running for state Senate -- an “absolute idiot” plus a word I’m not going to print on a Sunday morning. His campaign said it was a joke taken out of context. Fine. I said on the air back then, forget the apology. Just ask him one question: “Governor, did you mean it?” Because Lee said it best himself. The point of that video isn’t that he called somebody a name. The point is that they laugh at us when they think we’re not in the room.

Now put those all in a row. People of color are afraid to vote -- and the guy asking about it is over-reading. A warrant is wrong -- and the guy asking about it is provocative. A radio host is running for Senate -- and he’s an idiot. A woman with a camera asks about the campaign -- and the governor backhands her camera and the answer is “Oh, stop.”

You see the pattern. I see the pattern. Every step, the governor’s reaction gets a little bigger and the question gets a little smaller.

And by the way, this isn’t even new for him. Go back to July 2018, before he was governor. Democratic primary forum at Albertus Magnus. Joe Ganim pressed him on his business record. And according to the New Haven Independent, Ned Lamont put his hand on Ganim’s arm and said, “Joe, just relax.” And Ganim shot back, “Please don’t touch me.”

Just relax. Put a hand on it. Eight years later, same instinct. Only now he has the most powerful office in Connecticut behind him.

Look, I get it. Being governor is a hard job. Nobody likes getting a tough question when they’re walking to the car. But that’s the deal. That’s the whole deal. You asked for the job. You asked for it three times now. And the job comes with people asking you things you don’t want to answer.

The governor doesn’t get to decide what a fair question is. That’s not his call. Not mine either. The voters decide, and they can’t decide anything if the questions never get asked.

And he for sure doesn’t get to put his hands on somebody’s equipment because he didn’t like the question. Not a reporter’s camera. Not a citizen’s phone. Nobody’s. If you or I did that to a reporter at a town hall, we’d be talking to a police officer about it, not putting out a statement.

Here’s what really gets me. For most of his time in office, Lamont has had it easy. A Capitol press corps that mostly asks about the schedule. Friendly sit-downs. “Governor, how do you feel about...” Hardly anybody asking, who’s paying for this and why didn’t it work. And when he finally runs into folks who aren’t interested in keeping their access -- independent reporters, citizen journalists, a talk radio guy from Hollis, Queens -- he doesn’t know what to do with them. So he deflects. Then he scolds. Then he labels. Then, on tape, he backhands the camera. And when he gets caught, he calls the woman holding it a fake.

That’s not a man who’s comfortable defending his record. That’s a man who’s never had to.

Tuesday is Election Day. Watch the tapes. All of them. The polls one. The warrant one. The camera one. Watch how he handles a question when there’s no handler in the way. Then ask yourself if that’s the guy you want for four more years.

Lamont has had 8 years of easy questions. Now that he has to defend his record, he’s progressed, or worse, regressed to backhanding a woman’s camera.

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