. . . And His Lovely Wife (14 page)

Last week, I told my dad that so many people were coming up to me at book signings to talk about him. It helped them, they said, to read the stories about his life. It made them feel center-stage proud to come from the working class, instead of squinting into someone else's bright light.

I told my dad about these conversations, and asked how he felt about it all. I'd been a little nervous writing so honestly about his life, about how he was a giant to me but invisible to much of the world.

“Well, I've been thinking about that,” he said. “If it helps others to know they aren't alone, that they aren't the only ones who felt like I did, then maybe what I've done did matter.” He shrugged his shoulders, but then he grinned. It was the first time I'd ever seen him proud of the work he did.

Dad had another heart attack in Thursday's early morning hours, and it was time to do what we knew he wanted. The machines that pumped his heart and filled his lungs with air were turned off, and I held on to one of his big, gnarly hands for the few minutes it took him to leave.

At 69, Chuck Schultz finally started to believe he was somebody.

Now, he's gone.

And here I am, left behind, my hands at the keyboard, digging, digging, digging for the reason why.

Hundreds of readers sent cards, letters, and e-mails over the next few weeks. I saved every one of them.

I saved something else, too.

A few hours after we buried my father, somebody sneaked into our driveway and pasted a Bush bumper sticker on the back of my car.

I kept that, too, as a reminder that there is no respite, not ever, from a campaign.

nine

Grounding the Candidate

A
S SOON AS
I
HEARD THE HESITATION IN
J
OANNA
K
UEBLER'S VOICE
on the other end of the phone I knew something was up.

Joanna was the campaign communications director, but she had become my friend, too, after Sherrod hired her in 2004 as the press secretary in his congressional office. In addition to being very good at her job, she was intuitive and funny—and almost always knew when she was about to deliver news that would set my teeth to grinding.

“Okay, first of all,” she said, “I just want to say this wasn't my idea.”

“What wasn't your idea?”

“What I'm going to tell you.”

“What might that be?”

“Well, I'm going to tell you.”

“When might that be?”

“Well, now.”

Silence.

“Joanna?”

“Right.”

Big sigh.

“Well, a few days ago a Knight Ridder reporter was hanging out with Sherrod when he was leaving an event very late. So, he asked somebody, ‘Where is the congressman going to catch his plane?'”

“His plane?”

“Right. He thought Sherrod would be taking one of those small planes, but we told him that, no, Sherrod always rides in a car, that he never uses those small prop planes.”

“Does he know why?”

She hesitated. “Well, yeah, because I didn't think it was a big deal and, anyway, I agree with you.”

“And?”

“He thinks it's a big deal.”

“You're kidding.”

“
So
not.”

When Sherrod asked me to marry him on Thanksgiving Day 2003, I told him I would marry him on one condition: “If you ever run for statewide office, I don't want you flying on any of those little planes.”

“Never?”

“Not ever.”

Three months before I met Sherrod, Senator Paul Wellstone had died, along with his wife and daughter and three staff members, when their small airplane crashed in his home state of Minnesota. He was the fourth sitting United States senator to die in a plane crash, and I could still recite the others listed in the
New York Times
story by Katharine Q. Seelye: Bronson M. Cutting of New Mexico, Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, and John Heinz of Pennsylvania.

Seelye went on to name other prominent politicians who had died in small plane crashes, including former senator John G. Tower, commerce secretary Ronald H. Brown, and representatives Mickey Leland, Hale Boggs, and Nicholas J. Begich. Senate candidate Mel Carnahan of Missouri also died in a small plane crash in 2000.

It didn't take a mind of any particular brilliance to see that candidates and their staffs can lose hold of their common sense when campaigns heat up. Money, and votes, can be won or lost by how many events you make or miss, and I had absolutely no faith that a candidate and his staff, blinded by fatigue and ambition, would make the right choice when it came to whisking him off to the next appearance. I imagined an exhausted Sherrod surrounded by eager young staffers looking up at the tortured skies and declaring, “What's a little lightning when you've got five hundred donors waiting for you in Cincinnati?”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada was quoted in Seelye's story as saying that Wellstone's death “engendered a feeling of helplessness.”

“I can control what I speak about or what others speak about on the floor, I can campaign for people, I can raise money,” he told her. “But I can't control what airplanes do.”

I liked former senator Timothy E. Wirth's perspective a lot more. He told Seelye, “You surround yourself [with] a set of rules so that you don't get victimized, and in weather, you shut down…. We always had a senior person, a close friend, not a campaign person, who would be able to tell me to go jump in the lake if I got carried away.”

Way to go, Wirth.

I recited the
New York Times
story line and verse to Sherrod on the night he proposed, and repeated my one demand. “I'm not going to change my entire life for you and love you with all my heart and all my soul and have it all end because you were in a hurry to get to a fish fry.”

“I'll never ride in those planes,” he said.

“Never?”

“Not ever.”

Apparently Steven Thomma, a reporter based in Washington with Knight Ridder Newspapers, found this fascinating.

“He wants to talk to you,” Joanna said.

“About
this
?”

“Yeah.”

Now it was my time to be silent.

“I'd never try to tell you what to do,” she said. “Not that I could, and not that I would want to…”

“Joanna.”

“Can he call you? He says it won't take long.”

“You bet it won't.”

“You know, it
does
say something wonderful about the two of you.”

“Which part? That I love my husband or the part where I don't want him to die?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I guess that does distinguish me from all those wives who don't love their husbands and do want them to die.”

Long sigh from Joanna.

“Please?”

“For you, Joanna. Just for you. Go ahead and give him my numbers.”

Hours later, Thomma was on the phone.

“I find it interesting that your husband would agree to this,” he said.

“Really?”

“Well, you have to admit, it's a weird request.”

“Oh, really,” I said. “Are you married?”

He cleared his throat. “Yes.”

“Go ask your wife if she thinks it's a weird request.”

“Okay. Good point.”

“I have several good points, Steve. Would you like to hear them? I can talk to you about health care, or how we're going to raise the minimum wage, or maybe you'd like to chat about the war.”

“Actually, I want to write about how your husband never takes small planes.”

“This is a story?”

“I think it is. I think readers will care.”

And so for the next half-hour or so, we talked about why Sherrod doesn't fly on small planes and why this was a good thing for our marriage. I referred him to Seelye's sidebar in
The New York Times,
too, in an attempt to illustrate further the soundness of my mind.

His story ran in newspapers across the country. All 604 words of it, and only Alix Felsing, the national editor at
The Charlotte Observer,
added a phrase identifying me as someone other than Sherrod's wife.

“Would it be accurate,” she wrote in an e-mail to me, “if we said you won a Pulitzer as a Cleveland
Plain Dealer
columnist and that you're taking a year off to help campaigning…?”

She had the inside track on how I might be feeling about the identity theft of campaigning because she is the proud, but often invisible, wife of the
Observer
's popular columnist Tommy Tomlinson, who was a Pulitzer finalist for commentary in 2005. Tommy and I had exchanged friendly e-mails for a while, and met during the campaign after we both agreed to help judge the Cox Newspapers' annual journalism contests.

When I wrote her a gushing thank you, she responded: “I wondered if you might be experiencing some of the career erasure that I did when I married Tommy. He is my favorite husband of all time, of course, but when I solve the newspaper crisis and create world peace and cure cancer, my obit in this town will read: wife of Tommy.”

Sistah!

I do, however, give Thomma credit. He didn't make me look like a loon. In fact, by the time he filed his story he seemed persuaded that perhaps my request wasn't as bizarre as he first thought. He even cited this little statistic from the National Transportation Safety Board: Small planes are “40 times more likely to be in accidents than commercial jetliners.”

Then he added this description of a small plane flight by former senator Lauch Faircloth, a Republican from North Carolina, when he was running for governor in 1983. The plane took off from “a poorly lighted airstrip riddled with puddles.” This is what happened next, according to Faircloth:

“We were at liftoff. The plane hit a mud hole. It skewed the plane off to the right. We were knocking over trees like a bulldozer. It ripped the wings off. The plane was on fire from one end to the other. Fortunately there was a lake off to the side.”

A lake? As in body of water? Did I mention I can't swim? I reached for my inhaler and kept reading.

“We hit the lake and it momentarily put the fire out,” Faircloth continued. “But only momentarily. We got out and got away…. I was under water when I saw the light above us and I knew what that was. I swam underwater maybe 20 to 30 feet. By that time the flames from aviation fuel were 100 feet in the air. The fortunate thing was they lit up the area. I could see the shore, and got there.”

Am I a genius or what?

Thomma ended his story with our campaign aides insisting that Sherrod meets more voters by riding in a car, what with all those bathroom and hamburger stops. His walk-off was a quote from me:

“It's also a reality check…nothing is so important that we have to put ourselves or staffs at risk. I don't care what people think, I get my husband home at night…. I'm his wife, and I love him.”

The next day, a Republican blogger posted the story and added this comment: “Oh, sure, she loves her husband. Then why did she keep her own name?”

ten

The Hair Apparent

M
EN, MEN—EVERYWHERE MEN.
A
LL OF THEM WHITE, MOST OF
them middle-aged.

It was obvious, from Sherrod's announcement tour in December 2005, which reporters would be covering Sherrod's race. Back then, we were standing with our kids and several staffers in a crowded conference room in the Ohio state capitol building, cameras flashing like fireflies. I looked out at the journalists filling the oblong table in front of us, running the TV cameras on the periphery, and I couldn't help but detect a theme.

Now, I have nothing against white men. My dad was a white man. My husband is one, too. So is my son. Not to mention many good friends, most of my newsroom colleagues, and, with occasional exceptions during my career, all of my bosses. I do think, however, if only white men are weighing in, you lose certain perspectives, such as those coming from entire groups of people who don't enjoy the same political, economic, and social advantages that come automatically to a lot of white men. Women, and people of all colors, come to mind.

Some Ohio political reporters, such as
The Plain Dealer
's Mark Naymik, the Toledo
Blade
's Jim Tankersley, and the
Dayton Daily News
's Jessica Wehrman (a woman!), maintained a refreshing focus on issues throughout the campaign. They also challenged DeWine on his increasingly ugly allegations and tactics as the campaign progressed. Not coincidentally, they were younger than the average political reporter and columnist in Ohio.

Some of the other political journalists struck me as having covered politics for too long, which is however long it took them to become so cynical about the process of democracy that anyone who participated in it must be up to something that could not be good or real. They often seemed to focus less on issues than on polls and ad wars, which were easier to cover and kept the horse race galloping along.

One curious trend I noticed with longtime political writers in Ohio was their operating assumption that Sherrod was an angry man. For some reason, they apparently couldn't believe that fifty-three-year-old Sherrod Brown would risk a safe seat in the House and take on a two-term incumbent because he cared about the country. His longstanding commitment to social and economic justice just couldn't be what made him hit the road, day after day, week after week, to attack corporate greed and the government's betrayal of the middle class, or so the theory went.

He wasn't committed. He was just mad.

Columbus Dispatch
reporters Jack Torry and Jonathan Riskind seemed wedded to this notion for a while when they set out to write a profile of Sherrod. We first discovered this when concerned friends started calling after Torry or Riskind interviewed them.

One of Sherrod's oldest friends, John Kleshinski, was really worked up about this.

“What's up with this anger theme they're pursuing?” he asked. John and Sherrod grew up in Mansfield, and had known each other for more than thirty years. “He kept pushing me, kept insisting that Sherrod was angry, and I kept telling him he had it wrong, that Sherrod is not angry, he's passionate, and he cares a lot about the state of the country. That has nothing to do with any kind of personal anger. Where are they getting this stuff?”

I, too, answered that question from Riskind, and then Torry, and I assured both of them that the last thing this middle-aged woman would have wanted to marry was an angry man. Unfortunately, I inadvertently fueled their theory by telling them about our Ping-Pong table.

We had celebrated our second wedding anniversary in April, and I decided to surprise Sherrod with something to help him work off the stress of the day. I bought him a Ping-Pong table, and I think I should get mega wife-points for agreeing to put it in our living room for the duration of the campaign. My theory was that after long drives in the car around the state of Ohio, we could unwind a bit with a few light-hearted volleys.

What I had not counted on was that no matter how tired or weary from the road, Sherrod was one competitive sportsman.

“Sports?” you say. “Living room Ping-Pong is a sport?”

In our family, you betcha.

Night after night, Sherrod whacked that little ball as if he were playing for the title in the international World Tennis Team Championships. Leaping and lunging, charging and diving, he was one hustling hunk of he-man as he Ping-Ponged his hapless wife into table tennis oblivion. Sometimes after he won, which was always, he would make me laugh by hopping on the side of the table as if he were jumping the net, and then imitate the roar of the crowd.

I may have mentioned this during my interviews with Riskind and Torry.

To my horror, their story began with this:

Late most evenings, you can find Sherrod Brown smacking a ping pong ball in his center-hall colonial home in the Cleveland suburbs, sometimes imitating the roar of a crowd after a particularly good shot. He thinks about the war in Iraq and—whack. He frets about the minimum-wage worker he met that day and—whack. He dwells on the guy he met without health insurance and—whack.

In a field dominated by driven Type A personalities, Sherrod Brown, a 53-year-old Democratic congressman from Avon, stands out for his political intensity, his religious enthusiasm and his passionate belief that he is one of the bulwarks standing between the guys with the black hats and the everyday worker. He is so determined to prevail and he employs such zinging rhetorical jabs that some critics wonder if he is more angry than intense.

Oops.

I don't know how they came up with Sherrod's supposed thoughts during our games, but I had nobody but myself to blame for the starring role of the Ping-Pong table, which quickly took on a life of its own for the rest of the campaign. It was a convenient metaphor for whatever reporters were looking to prove: Sherrod was always competitive; Sherrod was angry; Sherrod and Connie were an intense couple; Connie was a great wife. (Okay, no one wrote that in reference to my gift of the Ping-Pong table, and I consider that a major lapse in the coverage.) For weeks, everywhere I went, people asked or joked about the Ping-Pong table, and Border's in Westlake even gave me a bucket of balls at my book signing, after hearing me answer a question about Ping-Pong on a local public radio show.

As for the anger angle, Sherrod might have anticipated this had he considered how often he lectured these reporters about how to do their jobs. Sherrod is a true policy wonk. He loves the world of ideas, and that's what he wants to talk about. Too often, especially during a campaign, political writers focus on process. Inevitably, at least one of them called every time a new poll came out and asked the same old questions: Are you worried (or encouraged)? How do you explain the voters' change of heart (or resolve)? Does this change (or affirm) your campaign strategy?

There were so many public polls that after a while it felt as if voters were suffering one long mood swing punctuated with hot flashes, especially in the first few months of the campaign. By the last few weeks, Sherrod was so consistently ahead in polls that some political columnists became a source of entertainment for us. So many had predicted that Sherrod either couldn't win or would be in the fight of his political life. Now these same columnists were arguing that their earlier predictions were actually more nuanced and sophisticated than their one-note analyses had suggested.

And then there were the four debates. After every one, the overwhelming amount of coverage—including the photos that were published—depicted the demeanor of the candidates rather than the substance of their arguments. It seems to me that if you put two men in a room to pick each other apart, you're going to get some arguing. You also will be able to tell who stands for what, but that didn't seem to get nearly as much ink. This made Sherrod testy on occasion, and he wasn't shy about expressing his displeasure, like when the reporter in question was seated across from him or shuffling alongside him with a microphone in his face.

Reporters sometimes complained to me about Sherrod's reprimands, and I wasn't without sympathy for them. I'd been on the receiving end of Sherrod's tirades about the media, especially when we first started dating, and they ain't a lot of fun. He was right that political reporters often asked only the questions they thought would confirm their own assumptions, and that some of them did not educate themselves enough on complicated issues such as trade and the budget deficit. But most reporters I know work hard, and increasingly, they are waging battles in their own newsrooms, which are suffering from budget cuts and editors who've become consumed with profit margins and who fear complaints from the far right.

I don't know a human being who responds well to a diatribe, and whenever a reporter pulled me aside to complain about an upbraiding from Sherrod, I would have another talk with my beloved that usually started, “So, I hear we had a little talk with….”

Despite some frustrations with the Ohio reporters, overall they did a better job of covering the campaign than the national reporters, who parachuted in for a day or two, if that, and then filed their stories. Outside journalists also had a tendency to divert the discussion from the issues that Sherrod had decided were central to his campaign: jobs, health care, and education.

We had to remind ourselves constantly that Sherrod, not the press, was in charge of setting the agenda for his campaign. In June, for example, a
Newsweek
reporter called Joanna to ask whether the murder of al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq would change our campaign strategy. Sherrod and I were in the car when the call came. At first, we started to speculate on how it would affect our campaign, and then it hit us: Nobody in our campaign heard this news and thought, “Oh, wow, Zarqawi's dead. We have to change what we're saying.”

Zarqawi's murder had nothing to do with our campaign strategy. That same week, we had lost two more Ohioans in the war. The goal, the ever-present concern, was how to end this war and bring our troops home. Sherrod had voted against the war from the beginning, and we had already attended too many funerals and wakes for fallen troops. Just because a reporter perceived Zarqawi's murder as a political opportunity didn't make it one.

We encountered this continuously in the campaign: A reporter would decide something was relevant or true, and Sherrod would have to spend considerable time and energy trying to steer him or her back to the issues he thought mattered. Granted, this can quickly evolve into a game on both sides, and journalists are right to be skeptical whenever a politician begins a sentence with “The real issue is…” But sometimes reporters start with an assumption and then cling to it for dear life no matter how much irrefutable evidence is offered.

As a journalist, I could certainly see both sides. Journalists and politicians are mighty suspicious of one another. Much energy in a campaign is spent trying to manipulate the media, and just as much effort in the media is invested in trying to capture a “gotcha” moment that can make instant news and derail a candidate. It can lead to testy exchanges, particularly as fatigue takes its toll in the final weeks of a long campaign. There were many days when I thought everyone involved could have benefited from a good nap.

There were exceptions in the national media. Peter Slevin of
The Washington Post
stood out as someone who researched every story as if it were a master's thesis. He was tough, but he was always fair. He also managed to coax from Sherrod the most amusing—or mortifying, depending on whom you asked—quote regarding our relationship.

Peter had tagged along with me for a few events and couldn't help but notice that some women asked if I would be moving to Washington if Sherrod won, their voices always laden with concern. The not-so-subtle message seemed to be that the only thing keeping my charming husband faithful to our marriage was my proximity.

Peter bounced this theory off Sherrod at some point in the campaign, and in the course of a follow-up call to my cell phone he gave me a heads-up on Sherrod's response, only days before his profile of me ran on page one of the
Post
's Style section.

“
What?
” I said, asking him to repeat what Sherrod had said.

Peter cleared his throat. “Sherrod said, ‘If I ever did anything, she wouldn't just cut my balls off. She'd write about it.'”

I gasped.

“You aren't running that, are you?”

“No, we don't use the word ‘balls.'”

Oh, good,
I thought.

What Peter didn't tell me, probably because he thought all my years in journalism had prepared me for this little sleight of hand, was that the
Post
would run Sherrod's quote, only substituting the word “testicles” in brackets.

Oh, great. Thousands of readers now thought that it was
fear
driving my husband to profound levels of loyalty. Fear of the lovely wife. I'm still hearing about that one.

         

T
HEN THERE WAS THE ISSUE OF MY HUSBAND'S APPEARANCE.
Specifically, the longtime practice in the media of describing him as “rumpled” and “disheveled,” not to mention all the commentary on his delightfully unruly hair.

I'm not saying I married Sherrod because he was cute, but I'd be lying if I said that his curly hair didn't help him through many an argument. And I loved that he didn't really care about how he dressed. As he always told me, he was clean. What more could a woman demand?

Still, I did try to work a woman's magic. His old friend Dennis Eckart, a former congressman, liked to say there was Sherrod
B.C
. and Sherrod
A.C
.: Sherrod Before Connie, and Sherrod After Connie.

Unfortunately, most reporters never took note of this crucial transformation in the Life of Sherrod when it came to describing how he looked.