. . . And His Lovely Wife (17 page)

“The whole point of the Hometown Tour is to show people in smaller communities that they matter,” she wrote.

It's a fact that county fairs are a huge focal point in many of these communities. I think that leaves us in the position of requesting that field staff structure our participation in fairs for the most positive experience it can be…. We all found [a previous tour] a useful exercise because you were able to meet and talk with “real voters” who aren't already engaged in some way….

I picked up the phone.

“Oh, okay, I'll go,” I told her, “as long as you're with me.”

“Deal.”

Wendy was always at my side, taking notes, reminding me of names, spotting people I ought to meet. She was also good at whisking me off when it was time to go.

Everything, it seemed, came with a learning curve. I was used to giving speeches, but not the kind that began and ended with my husband's opinions, and I was as bored as the rooms full of people listening to me had to be as I rambled on about health care this and lost jobs that, constantly peppering my remarks with references to Sherrod.

I had been brainstorming with Wendy on how to pump up the talks, and she kept pushing me to tell stories from my own life. I wasn't convinced that anyone would care about that. Then one evening I stood within spitting distance of yet another man suggesting I didn't know my place because I wouldn't change my name.

We were in a working-class town in eastern Ohio, where almost 150 people, mostly older couples, had gathered for an annual Democratic dinner. I was scheduled to speak for Sherrod, and the man in his seventies who introduced me said, “Well, now we're going to hear from Sherrod Brown's wife. She's one of those women who won't change her name, but here she is.”

I saw Wendy exchange glances with our driver, Chris, and then she shot me a weak smile. I returned the smile, and hers vanished. She knew I was up to something.

“Well, that's right,” I said, standing in front of the room. “I didn't change my name. It's Connie Schultz, and let me tell you why.”

I explained how Sherrod and I had been married less than two years, and how I was already entrenched in a career where my name was my currency. Then I shook my head.

“But you know what? That's not the only reason I kept this name. I want to tell you about my parents.”

I told them the story of Janey and Chuck Schultz, how neither of them had gone to college but insisted on it for their four children.

“My mother was a nurse's aide and a hospice worker. My father was a union member and worked for the utility company in a job he hated every day of his life. My mother died at sixty-two. My dad just died of a heart attack at sixty-nine. My parents wore their bodies out so that we'd never have to, and one of the reasons I fell in love with Sherrod Brown was because he has spent his entire career fighting for the people I come from.”

By the time I was finished, many in the room were wiping away tears, including the man who had refused to introduce me by name.

“I think Schultz is a wonderful name!” he announced from the front of the room. “I don't think you should ever drop your daddy's name.”

He walked me all the way to the car, telling me he'd just had heart surgery himself and sometimes it clouded his thinking. I gave him a big hug and told him I hoped he felt better real soon.

“You need anything, Sherrod needs anything, you give us a call,” he said through my open window. “We're going to make him the next senator from Ohio.”

Wendy waited until we pulled away.

“Told you.”

“Sorry?”

“Told you to start telling your own story.”

“Yeah. Well. Some things you learn the hard way.”

From then on, Mom and Dad were on the campaign trail with me, and the going got a lot easier.

One evening, after a long Hometown Tour day, my godson, Davis Filippell, rode home with us. Davis's parents, Mark and Buffy, had stood by me during the most difficult time in my life, when I was going through my divorce in the early 1990s. I have known Davis since the moment of his birth, and at age sixteen he was proving to be a devoted campaign volunteer, calling voters from headquarters, doing advance work for campaign stops, and stepping up wherever he was needed. This was his first time working for a political campaign, and our first time together on the campaign trail. On the ride home I asked him what he thought he had learned so far.

“This is so much more work than I had imagined,” he said. “Everybody works so hard every day for months and months—and at the end of it all, you can still lose.”

I looked at his face, and realized he was really worried that Sherrod would not win.

“You know what,” I said, “Sherrod's going to be home when we get there. Why don't you talk to him about that?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really.”

As soon as Davis and I walked through the door, Sherrod asked how our day had gone. I turned to Davis and said, “Go ahead. Tell Sherrod what you asked me in the car.”

I watched my godson and my husband standing less than a foot apart in our kitchen as Davis laid out his concerns and Sherrod answered.

“Davis, politics can be cruel,” Sherrod said. “In primaries, you can have a lot of losers, but always only one winner.”

Sherrod looked at Davis's worried face and smiled.

“Nobody's working harder than we are, Davis. And there's no way Mike DeWine and his people are working as hard as we are. And that's why we're going to win.”

Davis smiled, and Sherrod shook his hand.

“They also don't have you,” Sherrod said. “No way are we going to lose.”

         

W
ENDY INADVERTENTLY HELPED ME FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE IN
my own skin, too. With a camera always in tow, she took photos everywhere we went, and she encouraged me to write stories for the campaign's website about the people we met and the places we visited. I did a little of this, but I was uncomfortable writing what amounted to a society column, and I cringed at the sight of so many bad photos of me posted on the Web.

I had expected others to scrutinize my appearance. I had followed the coverage of Theresa Heinz Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards, and I knew how cruel writers could be in the name of journalism. What I didn't expect was my own sudden obsession with how I looked on any given day.

There was something about the honesty of photos taken in broad daylight that forced me to come to terms with an essential truth I had managed to dodge when no one was constantly aiming a camera at me: I was no longer thirty. I wasn't even forty. I was one year from fifty, and the longer I campaigned, the more I looked it. Sherrod kept telling me I was beautiful, but fatigue dulls the hearing, I guess. I also knew my lifestyle had morphed into one of inertia, of an armchair quarterback. I went from exercising and walking on a regular basis to spending entire days plopped in a car. Healthful meals were rare, as was a full night's sleep. You have to be twelve for that not to take a toll.

It came to a head—my head, actually—one morning after Wendy e-mailed some recent shots from a Hometown Tour and I almost started to cry at the sight of me. I had to change the way I looked at myself, and I had to change now. I was spending more time worrying about how high I had to hold my chin to have just one than about how I could reach people with a message of hope. That was not the woman I knew, and I didn't like her much.

It hadn't helped that women I
didn't
know felt free to give unsolicited advice on everything about me, from the length of my hair to the cut of my coat to the way I looked at my husband whenever he spoke. I was no stranger to that kind of meddling, though. I'd been getting free criticism about my hair and the shape of my face from women readers ever since I started writing a column. I made matters worse by wearing stiff suits that made me feel sawed off at the waist by the end of the day. I'd never been one to wear a lot of business suits. Why on earth was I doing it now? Who said this had to be the uniform?

I changed my outfits, and my attitude, and the funny thing is, when I browse through campaign photos now, I look just fine in most of them. I do, however, lament the time and energy I wasted worrying about that, especially when I think of some of the women I met during those Hometown Tours.

There were whole rooms full of feisty women who decided to form their own activist groups because, as one woman in Knox County told me, “We got tired of the men at Democratic headquarters asking us to make coffee and do the Xeroxing.” It was heartening to see so many women, most of them at least in their forties, and many of them a lot older, organizing to change the country. At an age when our culture wants us to believe women become invisible, these women were bigger than life. They were meeting in the smallest of villages and the largest of cities, and they loved hearing stories about women like them whenever I showed up.

Two women are lodged in my memory from the Hometown Tours. One of them, Mona Parsons, was a member of Military Families Speak Out. Her son had served in Iraq, and he made it home safely. He came home, though, to a different mother. She wanted to bring all the troops home, and she approached me before I spoke at a women's event in Knox County.

“Do you mind if I say a few words before you speak?”

“Of course not,” I said. I'd lost count of how many women thought they needed permission to join the discussion.

She leaned in, and I could barely hear her. “I'm not a very good speaker,” she said. “I get all nervous, and my voice trembles.”

I reminded her of the advice of Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers: “Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”

She smiled at that, and nodded. “Okay, then.”

The entire room grew silent as she spoke from her heart, asking them to pray for the safety of the troops and demand their safe return home.

Another woman, a mother in Appalachia, became one of my regular stories—and Sherrod's—on the road after she knocked the wind out of me at a potluck dinner.

She was in her mid-thirties, her four-year-old daughter at her side. She was wearing a cap on her bald head. She had just finished treatment for breast cancer, and all I could think about at first was how scared she must have been with cancer in her breast and a child so young.

We sat together for dinner before my speech, and she told me that I shouldn't worry about her. “I'm going to be fine,” she said, smiling. Then she gestured to the crowd of women in the room. “But these people here? These people need hope.”

After my short talk, we headed out for the next stop on our long drive home. Before I climbed into the car, Wendy handed me a $200 check that the mother had written to Sherrod's campaign. Drawing a deep breath, Wendy told me what the woman had said as she handed her the check.

“I hope you don't mind, but I had to postdate it. I don't get paid until Friday.”

fourteen

Karl Rove's Blunder

O
N THE MORNING OF
F
RIDAY,
J
ULY 14,
S
HERROD AND
I
BOARDED
exactly the sort of plane I had made him promise he would never, ever use.

I should have known something was up when we had to give our weight before we were allowed to board. It was an eight-seater, single-pilot flight from Boston to Nantucket, where we were headed for a series of fundraisers. I pulled out my digital camera, snapped a photo, and then fired off an e-mail from my BlackBerry to our scheduler, Shana Johnson:

How is it that I can see the mole on the back of our pilot's neck? you ask. Because I was in the last seat on this plane, and it was only FOUR SEATS AWAY from the ONE man charged with keeping us from nose-diving into the sea. How did this happen????

It had been an eventful month so far. Two new public polls showed Sherrod leading DeWine by six to eight points. And after months of angry outbursts about Sherrod, his former Democratic primary opponent, Paul Hackett, had publicly apologized and declared his support. Paul's wife, Suzi, and their three young children circled him at the joint news conference. As I watched first Paul and then Sherrod address the crowd in the 95-degree Cincinnati heat, I felt as if we were witnessing a holy moment in an unholy profession. It generated a lot of press coverage, in Ohio and across the country.

Their truce was a personal victory for Dayton blogger Chris Baker, editor of
Ohio 2nd,
who originally had supported Hackett. Baker was a smart and dedicated progressive, and he had posted a lengthy interview with Sherrod and then lobbied Hackett to mend the hole in that fence. Baker made all the difference. Sherrod and Hackett's public embrace buoyed party activists in Ohio and boosted fundraising, particularly in California, where some liberal donors had refused to support Sherrod, despite his thirty-year record of progressive politics, because they believed the national Democratic party had forced Hackett out of the race.

I tried to focus on this, the good news of the campaign, rather than the realization that the pilot had just opened a window—a
window—
to let in some fresh air. I thought all planes had to be hermetically sealed to stay in the air, so this was a disconcerting development, to say the least.

Shana called me as soon as we landed. It should be noted that she was having a hard time stifling her giggles.

“Connie?”

“Shana.”

“Seriously, Connie,” she said, not sounding serious at all, “it was the only way to get you to the island, unless you wanted to take a really long boat ride.”

“You know how I feel about these planes.”

“Yeah, but I thought you only meant you didn't want Sherrod to go down
alone
on one of them. You know, because of how much you love each other and everything.”

“You're joking.”

“Well.”

“Did Sherrod know we'd be on this plane?”

Silence.

“Shana?”

“I can't speak to what is in the candidate's head.”

That was all I needed to know.

I bade Shana good-bye and turned to my husband.

“You knew.”

“What?”

“You knew what kind of plane we'd be on.”

He sighed. “You told me long ago to stop worrying about these kinds of details. I'm focused on winning a Senate race, just like you said.”

Silence.

“You
did
say that,” he said.

Then it hit me.

“What's wrong?” he said.

“How are we getting
back
?”

He wrapped his arm around me and led me off the tarmac.

“Try not to think about that, honey.”

Only 115 more days. And counting.

         

W
E WEREN'T ON THE ISLAND FOR MORE THAN A HALF-HOUR WHEN
Joanna called with news that would alter the course of the campaign.

“Well, the day we were waiting for has arrived,” she said.

Mike DeWine had gone up with his first attack ad on TV. It included video of the burning Twin Towers, and it hit Sherrod hard on national security. DeWine started running the ad on a Friday, knowing we would not be able to answer with our own ad until Monday.

“It looks like a big buy, too,” Joanna said. What she meant was that Ohioans all across the state would see it, and we couldn't respond until Monday because TV stations don't staff their advertising departments on weekends.

Joanna immediately began setting up a conference call to brainstorm our response. One of the first things Sherrod did was call his eighty-six-year-old mother. “I don't want you finding out about this on TV,” he said.

Then we let our four children know, so that they wouldn't hear about it from someone else. Caitlin, our youngest and new to politics, was working at her summer job as a camp counselor for preschoolers when I reached her.

She greeted my news with silence.

“Cait?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yeah, Mom,” she said softly. “I'm just letting it sink in.”

Within the hour, we were on a conference call with the Triplets, our nickname for our consultants, David Doak, Tom O'Donnell, and Mattis Goldman. Our pollster, Diane Feldman; DSCC executive director J. B. Poersch; campaign manager John Ryan; and Joanna were also on the call.

“Apparently, we're the first Senate challenger to be attacked,” Joanna said.

“We've got to respond and hit back,” said O'Donnell. “This is going to be a lot of voters' first impression of Sherrod Brown. Women who are otherwise with us have concerns about national security.”

“This ad is so unbelievable that if we refute it, voters will believe us,” Doak said.

“And I'd prefer that the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] pay for the ad,” added O'Donnell.

That was the big question: Who would pay for our response ad? Fundraising was picking up, but we still were far from where we needed to be before we felt comfortable spending the nearly $1 million we'd need to compete with DeWine's buy. We needed the DSCC's resources, and for a few more weeks, our campaign was allowed to communicate directly with them. In the last months of the campaign, new campaign finance laws would prevent cooperation between candidates, on the one hand, and special-interest groups and party committees on the other. In July, we were still allowed to know in advance if the DSCC would help us, which allowed us to save our money for the last weeks of the campaign. Soon, by law, that light would go dark, and the rest of the campaign would involve a lot of guessing on our part, never knowing when we would have help and when we'd have to go it alone.

By the end of our first conference call, we knew what our ad should say, but we had no idea who would pay for it.

Senator Chuck Schumer solved that riddle in the time it took him to beeline his way to me at our first, crowded event on Nantucket. He grabbed my hand as if he'd known me forever and said, “Connie, I know what you want to know, and I'm going to tell you right now: We're going to fight back, we're going to pay for the ad, and we'll be up on TV by Monday.”

The wife in me wanted to hug him, but the journalist in me prevailed. I grabbed his hand with both of mine, and thanked him for believing in my husband.

Sherrod and I didn't actually see DeWine's ad until a few hours later, when Guy Cecil, political director with the DSCC, showed us on his laptop.

As much as I had tried to brace myself for the onslaught of ugly ads against Sherrod, I was still unprepared for the first time I watched his picture juxtaposed with the horrible images from September 11,2001. It wasn't just that the ad lied about my husband's voting record on terrorism. That was bad enough, but I was stunned by DeWine's trafficking in national tragedy for political gain.

It's impossible to gauge how many Americans were hurt or offended by the ad, which was covered on blogs and in national broadcasts. There were all the families, of course, the ones who lost loved ones when the Twin Towers burst into flames. The ad began with DeWine insisting he approved it, and then turned to an image of the blazing towers.

I also wondered how many children saw the ad. There had to be so many children whose hearts still raced at the sight of those horrifying images. It was, after all, a day that changed all of us. We soon found out that the ad was the handiwork of the same firm that had produced the 2004 Swift Boat ads against John Kerry, which falsely accused him of lying about his military service in Vietnam.

DeWine's spokesman told
The Plain Dealer,
“This is chapter one.”

Chapter two came sooner than DeWine expected. A few days after DeWine's attack ad went up,
U.S. News World Report
's Bret Schulte discovered that DeWine had used a doctored image of the Twin Towers. Apparently, the tragedy wasn't quite tragic enough, and an effort to depict more smoke after the first plane hit rendered the wrong tower on fire.

Minutes after Schulte's story hit the Web, reporters started calling our campaign. Journalists across the country weighed in. Some journalists described the deceit as simply politics as usual—a “misstep,” or, as one reporter put it, a mere “hiccup.”
Washington Post
columnist Al Kamen wrote, “This could be a very fun race.”

Others, though, were not so willing to play into the tired old argument that nasty campaigns were as inevitable as Ohio sweet corn in August. As one reporter told us, “DeWine's nice-guy image is gone for good.” Several journalists made it clear that they learned a hard lesson from the 2004 presidential race, when reporters waited too long to investigate the false allegations in the Swift Boat ads. This time, some reporters examined DeWine's claims point by point and exposed the distortions. They promised they would hold us to the same standard, which is what good journalists do.

At the time, DeWine attempted to dismiss the ad as a mistake by the consultants. He didn't fire them, though, and he continued to run the ad, complete with a new image of the smoldering Twin Towers. Three weeks later,
The New York Times
confirmed that Karl Rove, the White House strategist behind so many ugly Republican campaign tactics, had pressured DeWine to run the ad. As it turned out, it set the tone for many of DeWine's later ads, and some political analysts now say his campaign never recovered from that initial blunder. It set up DeWine as a desperate and nasty candidate who would do anything to win, and Ohioans had had enough of that kind of politics.

It was also a turning point for us. Every campaign has its junctures, and the first DeWine ad presented two options for Sherrod, who had to decide how he would conduct himself in the face of the ugliness we had known was coming. A week after DeWine's ad first ran, Sherrod sat down at his computer and typed a letter explaining his decision to his entire campaign staff.

It was a rare afternoon at home for us, and I could hear the
click-click-click
of his keyboard as I folded laundry down the hall. It had been a long but exhilarating week for everyone, and he knew exactly what he wanted to say. I didn't read his letter until it popped up in my own e-mail box.

First, he praised his campaign field operation for recruiting hundreds of volunteers to march in more than a dozen parades over a single weekend in southeastern Ohio. Then Sherrod turned to what he knew was on everybody's minds.

He assured our young and devoted staff that DeWine's sleaze tactics were wheezing gasps in a lifeless campaign. Then he reminded them why our campaign was so different:

On our side, there is a palpable passion for change, an enthusiasm the state hasn't seen since 1982 (before most of you were born), and a belief that our country can do a lot better. And we will continue to run an aggressive, always honest and honorable campaign to get there.

Long before a single vote had been counted, we'd already won.