. . . And His Lovely Wife (16 page)

twelve

If Not Now—When?

B
Y THE END OF
M
AY
, S
HERROD WAS GETTING NERVOUS ABOUT HIS
campaign's ad strategy. Immediately before the Ohio primary, Mike DeWine went on the air with two positive ads meant to depict him as a mild-mannered “independent” in the midst of rampant partisanship. It would be one of the few consistent themes of his campaign: Mike DeWine, unlike ardent liberal Sherrod Brown, could “get things done.” Sherrod, just as consistently, kept pointing out that Mike DeWine voted with President George W. Bush 96 percent of the time but spent most of his campaign bragging about the other 4 percent.

Most political analysts say that positive ads do little to persuade voters, but candidates who can afford to do so usually start with feel-good ads praising themselves. DeWine, who had nearly double Sherrod's cash on hand by then, was no exception.

One of the constant pressures in such a high-stakes race is deciding when to go on the air with campaign ads. Television advertising devours more than two-thirds of fundraising dollars, and Ohio is one of the most expensive states in the country because it has so many separate television ad markets: Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Youngstown, Steubenville, Lima, and Zanesville, as well as the Wheeling and Huntington/Charleston markets in West Virginia, which reach into southern and eastern Ohio.

It was our estimated television budget that forced us to set a fundraising goal that started at $7 million, considered very low, and went as high as $17 million, which would put us in the ballpark with DeWine, or so we thought. Everything was speculation. We had no idea how much of that money, if any, would be raised or contributed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

On May 31, I had a lengthy conference call with our pollster, Diane Feldman, and two of our consultants, David Doak and Tom O'Donnell of DCO Media. John Ryan and various other staff members also joined the call. Sherrod had asked for the strategy session because DeWine had already spent nearly eight hundred thousand dollars on soft ads meant to lift his profile with Ohio voters.

We had spent nothing on TV ads so far, and, barring an attack ad from DeWine over the summer, we didn't plan to go on the air until after Labor Day. This strategy was starting to worry Sherrod. He wanted to discuss whether we should go up earlier on TV. He wanted to define Mike DeWine before DeWine had a chance to define Sherrod Brown. Sherrod was especially concerned about southern and western Ohio, where many people had never heard of Sherrod.

Diane Feldman was just as concerned that Mike DeWine benefited most when voters didn't know much about him, and that it was our job to get the word out about his special-interest money and his votes that betrayed the middle class.

Sherrod couldn't join the call because of scheduled speeches, so I took notes throughout the phone call. Rereading them months later, I realized the conversation illustrated a great deal about the how and why behind campaign ads. It also provided a glimpse into how we made decisions about when, and what, to air in our own campaign, and reflected a general anxiety over how much the DSCC would help Sherrod. I was noticeably silent in the following exchange because I had never been involved in a campaign, and all this back-and-forth about how and when to market my husband rendered me speechless, which is rare indeed.

Pollster Diane Feldman had worked for Sherrod for ten years, and she knew Sherrod better than any of the other consultants. Smart and direct, Feldman seldom drew attention to herself with self-promotion. We paid a lot of attention to her because she was virtually always right, and I listened with a heavy heart when she said it was up to us to define Mike DeWine, and then outlined how we should do it.

“We should be more pointed on our negative,” she said. “It helps Mike DeWine in Ohio when voters don't know him. We need to connect him to [the political scandals in Ohio], to the pay-to-play culture. It puts the world on notice that we'll go after him. It also attacks the whole notion of DeWine as moderate.”

She added that she had “enormous concerns” that waiting could hurt fundraising for later ads.

David Doak laid out what a “perfect world” would look like in a campaign: “We'd go up first and define Sherrod in positive terms but choose those traits we'll use to contrast him with DeWine. Then we'd hit hard on DeWine before he hits us. Then we'd hit hard in response after DeWine attacks Sherrod.”

That perfect world was also an imaginary world for the Sherrod Brown campaign. “I think DeWine will have more money than we do,” said Doak, “so we have to bypass the first stop and move right to the second.”

Tom O'Donnell posed the crucial question: Do we want to start this war early? “DeWine's interest is to run us out of money early so they can overpower us in the fall,” O'Donnell said. “Do we want to start this war earlier than later?”

O'Donnell was also wondering just how much the DSCC would invest in Sherrod's race, which was one of about a dozen competitive Senate races. “One thing that worries me is that the DSCC doesn't think Ohio is special,” O'Donnell said. “Their only interest is how to get the majority for their bosses. If you're in the hunt, you get the money. If not, you're cut off.”

Doak agreed. “My experience is that at the end, whoever looks closest in the polls gets the money.”

The bang for the buck mattered, too, said Feldman. “If we're two points ahead and Rhode Island is two points ahead, then they're going to give it to the smaller, cheaper state because Ohio sucks up the money,” Feldman said.

“In the same way we strategize against the DSCC, they're strategizing against us regarding the decision to help us early versus later,” Doak added.

Michael O'Neil, an Ohio native who worked for the DSCC, came over to our campaign to help with fundraising. He said our hunches were right. “Pretty much everything said here is true. The DSCC is going to give us a certain amount of money. After Labor Day, it may go up, but it won't go down.”

Doak said that meant we needed to get aggressive—now: “That argues for doing what we need to do early to stay in the race. If we go soft, then DeWine will come back and cream us. Getting to DeWine early means we can paint the picture of DeWine.”

Feldman cautioned against using a strategy meant to pump up Sherrod. Her polling and focus group research indicated that was a losing strategy. “Having listened to these swing voters, I can tell you they're not going to vote
for
anyone. As wonderful as Sherrod is, it is far harder to get them to believe in Sherrod Brown than it is to get them to vote against DeWine.”

O'Donnell was growing impatient on the call. “We have no idea what DSCC is willing to spend. This conversation is premature until we have some kind of ballpark figure from DSCC.”

And Feldman felt we were aiming too low in our fundraising goals.

“Our seven-million-dollar budget scares me,” she said. “We won't be able to go up right after Labor Day.”

There seemed to be so many variables: O'Donnell said the only thing that would raise money for Sherrod was good poll numbers. Doak said we should look at this as a chess game: We have to anticipate DeWine's moves. Then O'Donnell added that we had to be in a position to respond quickly, which meant having enough money to go up with ads.

Then we went back to the war analogy again.

“We can either start the war or wait for him to start the war,” Doak said. “DeWine could be saying, ‘What could the DSCC do with money if we start now?' Republicans will spend more money than we do. ‘Early' is not defined in calendar terms. It's relative to the other person's race. If DeWine goes up on TV, we can't afford not to. If the DSCC won't help, we're going to have to gamble.”

Then he added that going early was not “in our strategic interest” because we didn't have enough money.

In the alternative, we would have to rely on our press operation to get the word out, Feldman said. More news conferences, more radio calls, more interviews and press releases.

That conversation quickly returned to what the DSCC might, and might not, do to help Sherrod win.

“We can't look at the DSCC as a savior,” Doak said, “but at some point we will have to be willing to gamble. The key question: We have to figure out what they
will
do for us. We don't know how much they
may
give us, but we have to try to rope them into making them help us.”

O'Donnell wanted us to get aggressive on our own. “People aren't in the mood to be romanced,” he said. “They want to see how the other guy's a schmuck. DeWine had a $750,000 buy and look what it got him: Nothing.”

O'Donnell was right. Some public polls showed DeWine getting a slight bump, if any, from his puff ads, but our internal polling indicated that DeWine had just wasted a lot of money. Sherrod was pulling ahead.

Joanna raised the question Sherrod and I asked ourselves every day: “What if DeWine goes negative?”

“We have to go up,” Doak said. “We can't worry about tomorrow. I trust Diane's poll. After three weeks of TV, we're ahead. We shouldn't worry about these crazy public polls.”

Feldman recited her public poll primer that she would have to repeat many times to us during the campaign: “In some of these public polls, you're talking to a lot of nonvoters and people who are paying absolutely no attention. It's bad polling. I believe my poll is real and predictive.” (She ended up being right.)

Joanna wanted to know, if polling drove fundraising, which polls the DSCC was paying attention to.

For now, they were tracking Diane Feldman's. That sharing of information, though, would end sometime in August because of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law, which forbids any communication between campaigns and independent groups. The DSCC was doing its own polling, too, and we would not be able to know their numbers, either.

There were a lot of sighs all the way around. Would the DSCC stay with us, or would we have to hold our own in the endgame?

As it turned out, the DSCC would help Sherrod more than any other Democratic Senate candidate in the country.

But on May 31, we didn't know that. All we knew was that Mike DeWine had a lot more money than Sherrod, and he had a history of waging ugly campaigns.

We were stuck in a waiting game, hoping that money wasn't the only thing that could defeat Mike DeWine.

thirteen

Coming Out

S
OMETIMES
I
DIDN'T LIKE THE PEOPLE WHO SUPPOSEDLY WERE ON
our side. Even worse, I didn't like who I was when I was with them.

In early June, Sherrod and I attended a dinner for hundreds of Democratic supporters around the state, many of them major donors to political campaigns. An affluent couple was seated at our table, and when one of the evening's speakers mentioned his Christian values from the stage, they started shaking their heads.

“I hate that Democrats are suddenly talking about their faith,” he said. “I think born-agains are idiots, but I'll fight for their right to be idiots—just keep them away from our government.”

I am an ardent advocate for separation of church and state, but his derision for born-again Christians wiped away any appetite I might have had for the dinner. I wanted to lean over and say, “My mother was a born-again Christian, and she was one of the kindest, most progressive people I've ever known.”

My mother, Janey, was devout, and she raised us to believe that being a Christian meant fixing ourselves and helping others, not the other way around. Her faith was simple: God loves everybody, no exceptions, and that's the standard for the rest of us. While we did not agree on everything, my mother and I found common ground in the social justice issues driven by our faith. It stung to hear this man at the table lump my mother with the far-right fanatics who had co-opted our faith for their own political use.

This happened too often when I was in the company of fellow liberals. Many of them seemed to harbor a troubling disdain for other people's practice of religion, and it was counter to what liberals are supposed to stand for, which is tolerance at all levels.

Every poll on religion shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in God, and Sherrod and I were meeting them every day on the campaign trail. We sat next to them in African American churches, where, without fail, someone always handed us their own Bible to follow along when the preacher recited scripture. They worked at homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and at family planning centers. They were accountants who worked after hours to help poor parents fill out forms for the Earned Income Tax Credit, well-paid union members fighting for an increase in the minimum wage, and lawyers volunteering to represent indigent defendants.

I didn't say any of this to my dinner companions. In their eyes, I wasn't Janey Schultz's daughter, and I wasn't a newspaper columnist. I was the wife of Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, and challenging them could hurt support for my husband. If I'd learned anything by June, it was that there was no such thing as a private conversation in politics. So, instead, I sat there and held my tongue, angrier at myself than at anything they had said.

Later that same evening, the husband of Jennifer Brunner, a longtime friend of Sherrod's who was running for secretary of state, helped soften the edges. Rick Brunner was a practicing lawyer who put his own career on hold for a year to work on his wife's campaign. No matter how exhausted, he always beamed whenever he ran into us. He was having the time of his life. When we joined other statewide candidates and their spouses onstage, Rick turned to me and gushed, “Isn't it great getting the chance to spend so much time together? I mean, I know it's hard leaving your job, but isn't it wonderful to travel so much together?”

I had to admit he was right. This was the most time Sherrod and I had spent together since we'd married two years before, and the rigors of campaign life were actually bringing us closer.

“You learn so much about someone when you spend this amount of time together,” I shouted over the din of the music and applause. “Good things. You learn a lot of good stuff.”

He grinned. “Yeah, you sure do.”

I watched big burly Rick standing next to his wife, his hand resting gently on her back as she waved to the crowd. Every muscle in his face telegraphed what he was thinking: “Look at my wife. Ain't she something?”

“What are you smiling about?” Sherrod asked. He knew these staged events seldom brought out my cheerful side.

“Oh, nothing,” I said, reaching for the curls that were no longer on his head. “Oy. This hair.”

“It'll grow back, baby,” he said, pulling me close in front of the hundreds of cheering people. “It'll all grow back.”

         

I
N RETROSPECT,
I
SEE THAT
J
UNE WAS MY “COMING OUT” MONTH
in the campaign. Finally, I had found ways to use my journalist's skills to feel useful in my husband's race.

The first break came when Romi Lassally, features editor for Arianna Huffington's progressive blog,
The Huffington Post,
sent an e-mail asking me to write about Sherrod's campaign. Her father-in-law, Peter Lassally, had told her I was on a leave of absence but itching to write. Peter had produced Johnny Carson's show, and now did the same thing for Craig Ferguson. We had gotten to know each other over dinner one night with his remarkable wife, writer Alice Lassally, and my friend Michael Naidus, who set up the whole thing because he never stopped looking out for me. Now, apparently Peter had taken on that job, too.

Romi is forty-three, a married mother of three with boundless energy who almost single-handedly breathed new life into me as a writer. She didn't know that. In fact, she acted as if I were doing
her
the favor when she asked me to write dispatches from the road. Her timing could not have been better.

Romi's first e-mail came on the heels of a disappointing exchange I'd had with an editor from
Women's eNews,
a blog originating in New York. Its mission statement reads, “Women's eNews is the definitive source of substantive news—unavailable anywhere else—covering issues of particular concern to women and providing women's perspectives on public policy. It enhances women's ability to define their own lives and to participate fully in every sector of human endeavor.”

A local freelance writer had pitched a profile of me to
Women's eNews,
but their senior editor dismissed the idea out of hand because I had taken a leave for my “hubby,” as she put it.

The writer was stunned, and I was furious. I've been a feminist since my late teens, and the response of this editor, who was almost exactly my age, triggered old memories of my time as a stay-at-home mother, when I felt judged as pointless by some women who had full-time careers. The whole point of feminism was to provide a full palette of options for women, and then respect the choices they made for their own lives. We are not a monolithic group—wasn't that our point?

I wrote to that editor, assuring her that I was not trying to persuade her to change her mind about covering me, but I did hope she wouldn't write off the next feminist whose choices didn't meet her criteria for a meaningful life. I laid out my reasons for taking a leave of absence, and ended my letter with a plea:

Please try harder in the future to cast a wider net when deciding which women merit your attention. I've been a feminist since adolescence, and at 48, I'm still meeting women who make me stretch the boundaries of how we define the word and embrace the cause.

Instead of addressing the issue, she responded by asking me to write for their website. I declined, assuring her that I suspected no evil motives on her part but did hope we could pursue the discussion of how we define feminism. She wasn't interested in that. Instead, she accused me of overreacting to her original note. She did, however, apologize for calling Sherrod my “hubby.”

See why I was so happy to hear from Romi Lassally?

I wrote only four pieces for
The Huffington Post,
including one on why Sherrod and I weren't afraid of Republican smear tactics, but my lack of contributions wasn't because Romi wasn't prodding me for more. She was always coming up with column ideas, and she was a wonderful sounding board for me whenever I needed to vent about life on the road.

“Oh, you should write about that!” she'd say. “Oh, that one, too, that would make a great column!”

Campaigning, I found, sucked up most of my energy, and I ended up not writing as much as I'd hoped after a daily regimen of note taking. But I am so grateful to Romi for believing that this wife, on a leave of absence from her own career, still had something worth saying.

         

T
HE OTHER BREAK FOR ME CAME AFTER
I
BOUNCED AN IDEA OFF
Sherrod and John Ryan.

We knew Sherrod could not possibly visit every town and village in Ohio. So, what if we used me to focus on small towns, where so many working-class voters lived and worked? I was a small-town girl myself, having grown up in Ashtabula in a blue-collar life right out of a Bruce Springsteen song. I could talk to people and, more important, listen to them and take notes, with the promise that I would share their hopes and concerns with Sherrod.

John and Sherrod loved the idea, and John suggested calling it Connie's Hometown Tour. We scheduled five to seven stops in a single day across several counties, with Sherrod recording radio ads that would run a few days before each visit asking folks to welcome his wife, Connie, to their hometown. Joanna and her press team did advance work with the media to attract coverage in many of the smaller newspapers and local radio and TV stations. I soon learned that small-town reporters enjoyed chatting with a fellow journalist from Ohio's largest newspaper. I knew I was really succumbing to campaign fever when I celebrated any headline that called me “Sherrod Brown's Wife.”

I had various drivers during that time, and they all felt like family after a while. If ever there is an unsung hero in a campaign—besides the scheduler—it is the driver. You count on him to stay awake when you're exhausted and to get you there on time no matter what obstacles roll out in front of you. He is forever on the lookout for the perfect parking space and tolerable bathroom stop, and his radar is always up for the other party's trackers, who hope to capture you on videotape in a clumsy or, God forbid, inappropriate moment. The driver makes sure you always have enough brochures, buttons, and stickers, keeps the car stocked with bottled water, and listens as you practice material for speeches.

One more thing: Our drivers had to keep to themselves everything they heard in the car. In that spirit, we nicknamed the campaign car “Vegas.”

Three young men drove me: Chris Stelmarski, a newly minted high school graduate who doubled as our IT guy because he'd never met a computer problem he couldn't solve; Zach West, a recent college graduate who lived and breathed politics, having known Sherrod since the day he was born; and Ben Nyhan, another recent college graduate of unflappable resolve, who volunteered for us long before he was paid and never stopped thanking me for the adventure of a lifetime.

Field staff and volunteers, under the direction of John Hagner, “outperformed their résumés,” as John Ryan always put it. They built events for Sherrod and me throughout the campaign.

None of the hometown tours would have worked without Wendy Leatherberry, a seasoned veteran activist at age thirty-one, who used up weeks of vacation from her social services job to volunteer as my ever-present traveling companion.

Wendy was raised to save the world. She is the only child of Bill Leatherberry and Diane Phillips-Leatherberry. They named her childhood cat Sam, after Sam Ervin of Watergate fame. When she was six, they took her to the swearing-in ceremonies for Ohio's new governor and newly elected secretary of state, Sherrod Brown. She was in second grade and was supposed to write a report about her experience as a trade-off for missing school, but the teachers in her school district ended up being on strike that week. Her mother took her to the picket line so that Wendy could give her report in person.

In 1986, writer Jimmy Breslin interviewed eleven-year-old Wendy after a confluence of circumstances alerted him to her desire to be president of the United States. When he asked her what her first act as president would be, the little squirt didn't hesitate. She told him she would withdraw William Rehnquist's nomination for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

In seventh grade, she was already donating babysitting money to a presidential campaign, insisting that her parents allow her to buy a money order so that Joe Biden would know the money came directly from her. When she was a freshman in college on a visit home to celebrate Passover, her mother insisted they have dinner at a shopping center in the black community where someone had recently been shot. The point of this impromptu excursion was to prove that white people weren't afraid.

By the time I met Wendy, she had already held significant roles in several campaigns and was the youngest member and only woman on the Cleveland Heights–University Heights school board. She was also board president, and I bragged about her constantly in speeches, especially when the room was full of women.

Wendy had been a steadfast reader of my column and a friend, so she already knew we had a lot in common. What she didn't know at first was how uncomfortable I was with campaigning.

I wasn't accustomed to approaching strangers without a reporter's notebook. It was one thing to be armed with a pen and pad and scribbling down the answers to questions I asked. It was another to thrust out my hand and try to convince someone visiting the cow barn at the county fair that they should care about my husband. I wince at how awkward I felt when I showed up at diners or festivals and interrupted someone's conversation to talk about a Senate race that hadn't even crossed their minds.

After one particularly hot and exhausting round of county fairs, I wanted to put a stop to those visits—and the tours. I was not convinced we were doing any good, and my asthma was acting up. I was tired of wheezing my way through dusty days. Wendy had the courage to sit down and write me a lengthy e-mail about why I needed to keep going.