. . . And His Lovely Wife (8 page)

On Tuesday, February 28, I drove out of the
Plain Dealer
parking garage for the last time in 2006. I pulled my gray Pontiac Vibe into a carwash about a block away, blasting Bruce Springsteen as the suds poured down my windows. When it was finished, I pulled to the side of the lot, got out of my car, and dried off my bumper with one of my gloves. Then I reached into the glove box and pulled out what I'd been waiting for weeks to stick to the back of my car.

It was a red, white, and blue bumper sticker: “Sherrod Brown for U.S. Senate.”

I hit the highway, focused on the road ahead.

four

My Husband, the African American Woman

J
ACKIE AND
I
WERE HAVING DINNER IN
C
LEVELAND WHEN A WAITRESS
came up to me and said, “Ms. Schultz, I'm sorry to bother you, but did you know that Fox News is saying your husband is Shur-ROD Brown, and that he's a woman?”

“That explains so much,” Jackie said, shaking her head.

I threw a cherry tomato at her and thanked the waitress for the update.

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh had also weighed in on Ohio's Senate race with his usual brand of wisdom. Paul Hackett had dropped out, Limbaugh said, because the Democratic bigwigs wanted Sherrod—which he, too, pronounced “Shur-ROD”—who was African American.

Reporters, talk show hosts, and bloggers were having a lot of fun with all this. So, when I gave a speech the following day to about 150 women, I thought it was best to come clean.

“Well, as you all know by now, Rush Limbaugh said my husband is African American.”

Laughter, mixed with a few gasps by those who listen only to public radio.

“And Fox News said he is a woman.”

More laughter, now mixed with much shaking of heads.

“So, you see, I'm even more liberal than you thought. I'm actually married to an African American woman.”

Oh, we hooted and hollered over that one. Nothing like a room full of rowdy women to clear your head.

I may have been making jokes, but our new campaign manager, John Ryan, was all business.

John called a mandatory meeting for all staff.

“I want you there, too, if you can make it,” he said in a phone call to my cell. “Sherrod has to be in Washington, but I want everyone to understand how serious these ground rules are, and your being there will drive it home.”

“Ah, yes, Frau Schultz, that will scare them.”

“Connie.”

“I'll be there.”

It would be one of only three times I would show up at the headquarters during the campaign, bloggers' claims notwithstanding. (“She's running everything!” one blogger declared. This came on the heels of Sherrod's telling
The Plain Dealer
that his wife was a chief strategist. Like that's not true in
every
healthy marriage.)

Aside from these three visits, my physical absence from headquarters was deliberate. I'd heard too many horror stories about over-bearing political wives, and I wanted to make it clear to everyone that Sherrod and I trusted John to hire the people we needed to do the job. The last thing John needed was a hovering wife who threw her weight around just because she could. John said he was asked many times during the campaign what it was like to work in a campaign with two strong-willed people at the helm, and he always told them that Sherrod and I never tried to strongarm him or undermine him. Why would we? We wanted John because he was a proven organizer and leader, and we knew he would worry so we wouldn't have to—which his subsequent new crop of gray hair clearly proved is exactly what he did. Nobody sweated the small stuff like John Ryan, and we relied on him every single day.

One of the policies we established early with John Ryan was that Sherrod and I, not the campaign, would pay for all of my flights and our kids' flights. We did not think it was fair to take contributions from people who supported Sherrod's race and then use some of those funds to fly his family around, and we made sure that everyone on staff knew this was our policy.

At the meeting, John asked everyone to introduce themselves and invited a variety of staffers to speak before he laid down the ground rules for the campaign. The room grew silent as he rattled off the list:

• Every e-mail can be subpoenaed. Use good judgment. Don't write anything you wouldn't want to read in the next day's newspaper.

• Never, ever use government e-mail for campaign communications. No campaign e-mails to the congressional office, and vice versa.

• No government staff may work for the campaign during office hours.

• Everyone should learn where the panic button is located in the office, as well as the code word if someone feels threatened by a visitor. You yell it out, someone else knows to call 911. (This came about in part because of several attacks on Kerry workers in Ohio in 2004.)

• No woman walks unescorted to her car at night.

• Everything you do and say is for public consumption.

“For a lot of people, you're the closest they'll ever come to meeting Sherrod,” John said. “Remember that. When you're out there talking to people, when you're in here answering the phones, whenever you open your mouth on behalf of the campaign, you represent Sherrod Brown. Remember who he's fighting for, and live up to that promise every single day.”

I looked around the room at all the young faces, many of which I was still trying to name, and wondered what brought these people to this place, at this time, for this candidate. I hoped they were there for all the right reasons—including the eleven million people of Ohio who deserved better than what they were getting from their government.

As it turned out, almost to a person, that's exactly why the staff were there.

         

C
AMPAIGNS ARE LIKE LITTLE COMMUNITIES, WITH ALL THE ATTENDANT
problems of small-town life. Gossip, office romances, personal crises, and behind-the-scenes conniving—it was all there, and far more easy to discern than most of the staff realized. Sherrod certainly didn't need to know about all that. In the process of protecting him, though, I lost my closest confidant.

To get Sherrod focused, Ryan developed a system that removed Sherrod from much of the day-to-day concerns and pulled me in, to the point where I would tell Sherrod about developments and problems only on a need-to-know basis. Let Sherrod focus on the big things: raising money, giving speeches, holding news conferences.

Some staff members tried to expense their parking tickets? Please don't tell Sherrod.

An employee posted anonymously on a nasty blog? Dumb thing to do, don't let it happen again. Sherrod remained unaware.

But when we hired a staffer who claimed he was twenty-five and an ordained minister, and then found out that he was neither? Oy. Gotta tell Sherrod that one.

Never did I think I'd be in this position with my husband, but as the campaign wore on, I saw how important it was to insulate him from much of the day-to-day missteps and mini-crises.

Ryan's list of priorities for Sherrod gave him more than enough to worry about, particularly if he was ever to meet the monthly and quarterly fundraising goals. Heaped onto this stress were initially impossible demands.

Kimberly Wood, our Ohio campaign finance director, was young and talented and shared Sherrod's commitment to social and economic justice. She knew how to raise money, too, but she had yet to learn how to deal with Sherrod in a way that didn't make him want to pull out his eyebrows. She meant well, but she had a habit of pushing him in ways that he felt suggested he wasn't trying hard enough. As he kept reminding her, “Kimberly, nobody wants to win this race more than I do.” To which she would always respond, “I know. I know. Sorry.” And then she'd push him even harder.

The chief role of campaign fundraisers is to identify potential donors and then provide the candidate with call sheets listing their names and phone numbers. The call sheets must be updated regularly, ideally on a daily basis, so that there's no such thing as “downtime” on the campaign. The only exceptions to fundraising calls were when he was attending fundraising meetings or fundraising events or giving speeches or media interviews. Sherrod wasn't expected to call when he was asleep, but he was encouraged not to make sleep a habit.

By February, Sherrod was getting frustrated with his fundraising team, and not because he didn't understand the importance of raising money. Many days, that was all he did. But he was making up for lost time after a late and difficult beginning, and it seemed that all he heard from our team was how his efforts weren't enough. They were young drill sergeants, and the concept of positive reinforcement was often lost on them. But there was a bigger problem, and that was how to get Sherrod refocused after he'd spent so many weeks worrying about everything. Now we had John Ryan, but by the time John became campaign manager, Sherrod had already spent too much time and energy weighing in on the minutiae. Meddling had become a habit. He was fretting over staff hires and salaries, campaign material and media coverage, and regularly placing phone calls over what was and wasn't getting done.

Ryan, who was concerned about fundraising, called me. He'd known Sherrod for nearly two decades, and he knew no one campaigned harder than Sherrod. What he wanted to do was break Sherrod's habit of weighing in on all aspects of the campaign.

“We have to get him focused, Connie,” he said. “He has to make more fundraising phone calls, and Kimberly wants him to have someone from her team with him all the time to help dial and answer the phone.” We agreed that I would wait to talk to Sherrod until after his meeting the next day with Ryan and Kimberly.

Ryan laid out his marching orders for Sherrod in a memo, which he updated at least weekly and sent to the two of us throughout the campaign: “Your brain, energy and commitment must be fully focused on three activities you do well: speaking to voters, media and raising money.”

In a meeting at our home two days later, he told Sherrod that the campaign must target swing voters, and that Sherrod would have to raise an impossible amount of money, between $14 million and $17 million.

“If we have enough money, you will win,” he said,

Months later, when our own polling showed Sherrod steadily pulling ahead, Ryan finally admitted to us that early in the campaign he did not think Sherrod could beat DeWine no matter how much money he raised.

“So you lied to us?” Sherrod said in mock horror.

“No,” Ryan said, grinning. “You never asked if I thought you could win.”

Ryan's first priority with the campaign was damage control. He had to, as he put it, “unhire” some people who had been hired without Sherrod's knowledge, and at high salaries. This included two of the national fundraisers. Ryan agreed with Sherrod's assessment that they weren't doing their jobs, and he promptly fired them. They were replaced by Kim Kauffman, a tireless Democratic fundraiser who, like our Ohio fundraising director, Kimberly Wood, shared Sherrod's political vision—and always returned his calls and e-mails, which was a dramatic improvement.

By mid-February, Sherrod was averaging about fifty fundraising calls a week. Ryan and Kimberly met beforehand to develop a script for their conversation with Sherrod.

“We're going to set a goal for Sherrod,” Ryan told her. Later, he admitted it hadn't occurred to him that he should explain to Kimberly that Sherrod would be the one to set the goal, with their help. Instead, Kimberly suggested to Sherrod that he had to start making four hundred calls a week. Fortunately for Kimberly, she announced this in a restaurant, over lunch, surrounded by lots of potential voters. Unfortunately for her, she didn't realize just what button she had pushed. Sherrod is a math whiz. He loves numbers. The dictionary stand in our kitchen holds not a dictionary, but an encyclopedia of baseball statistics. This is not a man you want to bully with numbers.

“Kimberly,” Sherrod said, “that is not humanly possible.” Kimberly, of course, disagreed. Like most good fundraisers, she thought her part of the campaign was the only thing that mattered. This was in direct conflict with our field staff, who thought voter contact was the only thing that mattered, and our communications staff, who were convinced that press coverage was the only thing that mattered. To be fair, they all were willing to concede that maybe there should be a little time set aside for “those other things,” as long as it didn't conflict with what really mattered.

After a spirited discussion, Kimberly finally agreed with Sherrod that perhaps two hundred calls a week was a more reasonable goal. That way Sherrod could at least leave a message with the potential donors he called—at least 65 percent of the time his first call was to a secretary or voice mail—and he'd also have time actually to talk to them if they returned his call.

Sherrod refused, however, to let someone else place his calls. “I've never done that,” he said. “I never did that in my office, and I'm not going to do that now. It sends the wrong message, that I think I'm too important to dial my own phone.” I told Ryan I didn't see Sherrod budging on that one, and I agreed with his decision. From the beginning, Sherrod and I insisted that he would never compromise his core values, and this was one of them.

A deal was a deal. From March 1 through November 5, Sherrod averaged 201 calls a week, and in that time the campaign raised more than $7 million.

Sherrod dialed his own phone, every single time.

         

M
Y FIRST SPEECH FOR
S
HERROD WAS ONE
I
DIDN'T EVEN KNOW
I would be giving until an hour before I was scheduled to go up onstage at the Ohio Democratic Party's endorsements meeting in Columbus, the state capital. I was on my way there, but my plan was to watch my husband accept the party's endorsement and then go to dinner with him. Instead, I was on the phone with John Ryan, who called to tell me that Sherrod was running late and they needed me to speak for him.

It was fairly uneventful, if you didn't count the two men who told me they hated Sherrod for running against Hackett, and the fretful party chairman, Chris Redfern, who pulled me aside right before I stepped onstage to ask if I'd ever given a speech before. I assured him I wouldn't embarrass him or anyone else and proceeded to thank everyone for supporting my husband, even though I knew full well there were plenty in that auditorium who thought Sherrod could not win.