. . . And His Lovely Wife (15 page)

When I met Sherrod, he always wore T-shirts under his dress shirts, but none of them were white. He refused even to open the pack of white undershirts I bought him shortly after we started dating. He had plenty of T-shirts, he insisted, referring to the booty typical of any longtime elected official: dozens upon dozens of T-shirts from a wide range of constituents. Hospital presidents, small-business owners, union members, cause-of-the-week activists—you name 'em, they've got 'em, all in size XL and emblazoned with slogans in big, bold letters.

“Why waste money on undershirts when I have all of these?” Sherrod would say, pointing to the colorful mountains of cotton ranging from dingy white to neon green. Why, indeed.

So, during the campaign, my daily checklist included eyeballing his dress shirt every morning to make sure no logo or slogan was bleeding through. “Locked out at AK Steel—WHY?” read one that got him stopped at the door. Another shirt banned for the duration of the campaign blasted front-and-back protests: “STOP Fast Track Authority Running Over the American Dream,” read the front. The back, which I noticed as he was leaving for the car, shouted a new translation of NAFTA: “North America's Future Traded Away.”

Whenever Sherrod was in Washington, he had the habit of washing out his shirts in the shower rather than taking the time to run them to the laundry down the street. Clean is clean, was his theory, and he didn't much care that they were as wrinkled as used bedsheets. He figured, once his suit jacket was on, only the front of his shirt would show, and most of that was covered by a tie.

I received rounds of unmerited praise from friends and strangers when I started ironing Sherrod's shirts. When he decided to run for the Senate, I bought more than a dozen no-wrinkle dress shirts, two “travel suits” meant to hold up to the most rugged of rumple, and several “TV ties” from salesman Allen Roy at a local Jos. A. Bank shop. Normally I don't mention brand names, but over time Allen Roy became a real Sherrod advocate, calling my cell phone to complain when reporters continued to describe Sherrod as “rumpled” and “wrinkled” when he was wearing clothing specifically designed to thwart such conspiracies of nature. I think Allen took some of this criticism personally.

“Have they even
looked
at him lately, or are they just using file photos?” he asked in one call. In another call, Allen reminded me to switch Sherrod's ties more often. “People notice these things,” he said.

I realize all this hovering on my part suggests I was Sherrod's mother, not his wife, but I'd lost that battle months ago. Total strangers were forever advising me on Sherrod's appearance, as if how he looked was my full-time job. They also felt free to comment on how thin he looked, wondering aloud if I ever cooked for him.

Then there was the hair brouhaha. Sherrod kept telling people “Change is coming,” but I had no warning on this one. It started out like any other day. I gave three speeches, then checked my cell phone for messages on my way home. That's when I heard the voice of Sherrod's colleague and dear friend, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

“Girlfriend,” she said, “all I'm going to say is, it'll grow back.”

What was she talking about?

I learned three hours later, when Sherrod walked through our front door fresh from Washington and a trip to the House barber.

One look at him, and I screamed.

Every last curl was gone.

Oh, reporters and bloggers jumped on this one. The haircut was part of Sherrod's new “Senator image.”

They were right that there was a strategy behind Sherrod's haircut, but they got his motive all wrong.

“I didn't want to have to go to the barber again for a while,” he said, holding me close and patting my back as if he were putting out a campfire. “Besides, baby, it'll grow back.”

When it came to Sherrod's wardrobe, we never knew when the next hit would come. At a press conference on a muggy August day in Toledo, a woman pulled us aside and said Sherrod should be dressed in cargo shorts.

“Cargo shorts?” Sherrod said, wrinkling his nose.

“Yes,” she said. “Cargo shorts. They're more appropriate in this weather.”

Sherrod had no idea what these were, so during the news conference I pulled out my digital camera, which I almost always carried in my purse, and photographed the three TV cameramen who showed up to cover his event. All of them were wearing versions of the saggy shorts.

I showed Sherrod the photo once we were back in the car. He took one look at those baggy rear ends and said, “I don't think so.”

Novelist Dan Choan, who lives in Cleveland Heights and became an occasional writer about the race for the
New York Times
op-ed page, took a shot on August 6. After interviewing a neighbor, his wife, and someone at a bar, Choan concluded that no one in Ohio cared about the Senate race and that Sherrod “looks like the manager of the men's department of the new Macy's.” Some guy at Macy's had to be real mad at that one.

Speaking of
The New York Times,
columnist David Brooks weighed in on Sherrod's appearance, too, writing that Sherrod wore “cheap suits.” This really set off Allen Roy, of course, and I wasn't too happy about it either, having been the one who handed over the charge card. But then, Brooks also claimed in the same column that Sherrod found a seat in the middle of a crowded room to draw attention to himself, when in reality Sherrod was pulling up a chair to sit next to his mother.

Sherrod took all this coverage of his attire in stride. He was who he was, and no amount of hovering with a can of spray starch was going to change him. I was reminded of this one morning in June when I tried to persuade him to pack four ironed shirts instead of the three he'd already stuffed into his duffel bag for another week in Washington.

“I can always wash one out in the shower if I need a clean shirt,” he said.

“Sherrod.”

He grinned and gave me a kiss.

“Baby? You got me to eighty percent. The last twenty percent is going to be real hard.”

eleven

Family Matters

M
OTHER'S
D
AY WAS ON THE HORIZON, AND WE WERE TRYING TO
figure out how to carve out time with Sherrod's mother.

That's when I started to see politics as a beast that was forever trying to set different rules for families and marriages.

Politics wanted us to believe that all the cherished rituals and traditions of family life—birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, even dinner at home—were but obstacles in the way of victory, and victory was the thing that mattered. Everyone in the candidate's family was expected to join in lockstep with the campaign.

But that beast was wrong—it was the rest of life that breathed oxygen into our lungs, and it was alarming to see how politics forced spouses and family members to become warriors in the fight for family.

Recently John Ryan and I had been on one of our rare trips together. He sometimes asked to drive me so that we could go over various aspects of the campaign, from staffing to issues, but also so that he could check on how I was doing.

About an hour into our drive, he turned to me and said, “I've never known a spouse to give so much to her husband's campaign.”

I looked at him in horror. “You mean not all wives
do
this?”

“Oh, no. No way. They'll say, ‘Okay, you go ahead and run, and I'll show up for the occasional event.' But most of them go on with their own lives. What you are doing is phenomenal.”

“Don't nominate me for sainthood just yet,” I said. “I'm a journalist, remember? It wasn't like I had a life I
could
go on with as long as Sherrod was running for the Senate. What was I going to do? Sit home and pout?”

“Okay, no saint status for you,” he said. “But still, your level of involvement is rare, and I'm glad you're here.”

I was surprised by how much John's words meant to me. As we drove through the night, I looked out the window and blinked back tears I couldn't explain. I started thinking about my daughter, Cait, who was the youngest of our four kids. She had felt the demands of the campaign perhaps a bit earlier than the others, which I didn't fully understand until a call from her sent up a flare.

Cait and I had been quite the duo for eleven years of single parenthood. It was Mom and Cait, all the time. Whenever she called, I dropped everything to talk. That's how it had always been before marriage to Sherrod, and I thought nothing had changed until that spring day when she called and must have sensed I was in the middle of something. I was in Los Angeles, waiting for a flight home.

“I know you're busy, Mom,” she said almost immediately. “I'll talk to you later.” And then she hung up.

I held the silent phone to my ear and realized this was the second time in as many days that she had done that. I called her right back.

“Hey, I'm never too busy for you—you know that, right?”

“Okay, Mom.”

“Cait?”

“Ohh
-kaay,
Mom. I gotta go.”

I felt sick to my stomach. The vertigo of campaign life was distorting my vision.

Days earlier, my son, Andy, and his fiancée, Kristina, had excitedly e-mailed the date of their engagement party in Long Island. I went from seeing the party as a celebration of their impending marriage to something that would derail my work for the campaign—all in the few minutes it took me to realize I was scheduled to give three speeches that day.

What a ludicrous response.

Sitting on the plane waiting for takeoff, my mind raced. Would Andy and Stina forgive me if I told them I could not spare the two days it would take me to fly there and spend time with his future in-laws? (They did, and our son-in-law, Michael Stanley, attended on our family's behalf.)

How would Sherrod do without me? Everyone on the campaign told me he did better when I was with him. What if, in a moment of frustration and exhaustion, he committed an error in judgment that ended up as a prime “gotcha” moment in the press? And what on earth made me think I could possibly have that much influence on him in the first place?

I thought about what my friend Michael Naidus had said to me at dinner the night before. Michael was a segment producer for Craig Ferguson's show, and we became instant friends after my first appearance on
The Late Late Show
in the fall of 2005. Michael was kind and smart, and I had come to value his dead-on observations about people and life in general. He was one of the first to send an encouraging e-mail after I took a leave from
The Plain Dealer,
urging me to continue writing columns and send them to him instead, until I returned to the paper. He had been worried about me then, and after listening to me describe the campaign, it was clear he was still concerned.

“You will have to work hard not to be cynical by the end of this campaign,” he said. “I think you're up to it; in fact, I know you are. But I want you to be aware, so that it doesn't sneak up on you.”

He was the second person to remind me to be ever vigilant when it came to focusing on what mattered. Two days earlier, the
Today
show's Ann Curry had kindly praised my composure during our segment when we discussed my book and my father's recent death. She said she was devoted to her father, and then she said she had already lost her mother and a brother.

“You know what I learned?” she said. “If you can focus on gratitude, you can't be sad.” She smiled and nodded, her eyes misting. “If you're grateful, it's impossible to be sad at the same time.”

On the five-hour flight home, I stopped thinking about what I had lost and tried to focus instead on my own gratitude list.

I was grateful that my father got to see my first book, and his starring role in it, before he died.

I was grateful that Sherrod had the chance, the privilege, of running for the U.S. Senate, and for the many decent, hardworking people willing to take a chance on him.

I was grateful, too, for our kids, Andy, Emily, Elizabeth, and Caitlin. All of them—and our son-in-law, Mike Stanley, and Stina, too—were already involved in the campaign and would dramatically increase their efforts, and their level of sacrifice, as Election Day neared. They believed in Sherrod with all their hearts, and they willingly disrupted their lives for an entire year because they also believed in what and who he was fighting for.

And I was mighty grateful that my mother-in-law was healthy and full of fight on behalf of her son. This was no surprise to anyone who knew Emily Campbell Brown. During the 2004 presidential race, she had been so frustrated by the lack of a voter registration drive in Mansfield's African American community that she set up a card table at a shopping center day after day and led the effort to register more than a thousand voters. Before Sherrod's campaign was over, she would commit to raising ten thousand dollars and then raised more than thirty thousand with a single fundraiser in Sherrod's hometown of Mansfield.

We would make time for her on Mother's Day, and I would start making more time for my daughter, too. She was a sophomore in college and the only one of our children still living near home.

I landed in Cleveland and headed for a fundraiser, where I would speak for Sherrod, who had votes in Washington. I called Caitlin on the way, but she didn't answer.

I left a message, spoke at the fundraiser, then headed for a labor event.

A half-hour later, I left another message for her. Gave another speech.

Two hours later, I called again. This time she answered.

“Hey. What's up with not returning my calls?”

She sighed. “I returned all of them, Mom.”

“Did you leave messages?”

“Yup.”

Walter O'Malley, our driver, looked over at me and shot a sympathetic smile. “You left your phone in the car, remember? You didn't want it to ring during your speeches.”

At that moment, there weren't enough apologies in the world to convince my daughter that she mattered at all. I was going to have to wrestle that beast called politics on a regular basis.

An hour later, I was standing in my kitchen when my youngest sister, Toni, called.

“Hey, Con, can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“You think it's okay that I've called Dad's house a few times to hear his voice on the answering machine?”

I grabbed a chair and sat down.

“It's fine,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Now, if you're doing that six months from now, we'll have to have a talk.”

“Okay.”

I was grateful that she trusted me enough to call.

M
AY TURNED OUT TO BE A MONTH OF REVELATIONS FOR
S
HERROD
and me. And in the process, he started whistling again, which I knew was a very good sign.

When you're running for elected office, people seldom ask, “How are you?” What they always want to know is, “How's it going?”

In the beginning of the campaign, Sherrod and I answered too honestly. We'd shake our heads and say, “This is so hard.” Sometimes, we'd list the reasons why: the endless push to raise millions of dollars, introducing yourself to entire regions of people who had never heard of you, total strangers giving you unsolicited advice on everything from how you wear your hair to what colors you choose for your bumper stickers. And then there was all that wear and tear on our middle-aged bodies as we traveled hundreds of miles a day cooped up in a car.

It didn't take long, though, for us to realize that whenever we answered like that, their faces would fall. They weren't really asking out of any concern for us. They were asking “How's it going?” because they wanted reasons to be hopeful. It had been fourteen years since a Democrat had won statewide office in Ohio, and the last thing they wanted to hear was whining.

Fortunately, around the same time in May, an activist in Cincinnati named Michele Young came to a book signing and immediately adopted me as her project. We were the same age, both mothers, and where I saw the end of my identity, she saw the beginning of a whole new career.

“You need to read this new book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt,” she told me. “I'm going to send it to you. It's all about how they gave people hope. That's what you and Sherrod need to do, too. We need hope, Connie. Hope.”

The book,
The Defining Moment,
by
Newsweek
's Jonathan Alter, arrived at the campaign office a few days later. It focused on FDR's first hundred days in office, and I devoured it, reading sections aloud to Sherrod late at night.

“What FDR changed most in his first one hundred days was how Americans felt about their future,” I said. “He gave them hope, and that's what we have to do.”

After that, Sherrod and I started talking a lot about the concept of hope and how to bring it alive for the men and women of Ohio. We started by offering a very different answer to the question “How's it going?” We knew it was important to be upbeat no matter how bad a week we were having, and this helped us focus on what was actually going right.

“It's going better than we dared hope,” I'd tell people. They often looked a little surprised at first, then relieved, even delighted. Our job was to stoke a hope in them that we were ready for whatever came our way and embolden them for the long days ahead.

Over time, I started to think that voters don't want you to be one of them when it comes to what you can endure. Oh, sure, they want to know you're a lot like them when it comes to where you shop for groceries and how much you love your kids, but they want to believe you have the kind of strength and courage that keeps you standing in the middle of a hurricane. We saw that question in their eyes every time they warned us about a Republican “October surprise,” spun worst-case scenarios about voter fraud, or conjured up images of a diabolical Karl Rove who would do anything to keep Sherrod out of office. They'd lay out the threat, and then look at us as if to say, “Are you up for this?”

Our answer had to be, “You betcha.”

And every time we said it, we meant it. That's the funny thing about focusing on what you can do rather than what isn't happening at the moment. I don't think it was coincidental that I started feeling better about the campaign as soon as I began reassuring others that we knew what we were doing and could handle any ugliness that came our way.

Good thing, too, because it wouldn't be long before we'd have the chance to prove it.