. . . And His Lovely Wife (22 page)

DeWine, for example, loved to describe Sherrod as being “on the fringe of his own party.”

“Respond, pivot, and deck 'im,” O'Donnell yelled.

“Are you calling workers fringe?” Sherrod said in the last debate prep before
Meet the Press.
“Are the majority of Americans who oppose the Iraq War on the fringe? Are our senior citizens who want affordable drugs on the fringe?”

“There you go!” O'Donnell said. “Don't you
dare
let him get away with that.”

The women in the room helped to give Sherrod balance. When the topic of school violence came up, the men immediately grilled him on what he would do to prevent future shootings. Liz Farrar, from Sherrod's D.C. office, politely interrupted.

“Shouldn't his first comment be to express sympathy for the families whose children have been wounded and killed?”

“Oh, right.”

“Sure, absolutely.”

“Well, yeah, that goes without saying.”

Throughout debate prep, we encouraged Sherrod to start with broad points, then zoom in on specifics. O'Donnell said that, unlike a lot of candidates, Sherrod really understood policy. He couldn't tell you how to play a CD or imitate the robot on
Lost in Space,
but he could give you a rundown of Will and Ariel Durant's entire
History of Civilization
because he'd read all eleven volumes. He loved talking about the lessons of history, and his memory—and enthusiasm—for numbers, which started when he was a young boy calculating batting averages of Cleveland Indians, had served him well throughout his career.

As the hours progressed, Sherrod got better and better. At the end of Day Two in debate prep, I turned to him and said, “You're going to have fun on
Meet the Press
tomorrow.”

Dennis nodded. “As the Pentagon would say, it's a target-rich environment.”

And Sherrod was ready to take aim.

nineteen

Bananajuana

A
S SOON AS THE CAMERA LIGHTS DIMMED ON THE SET OF
M
EET THE
Press,
Sherrod turned to me and said, “I didn't want it to end.”

His debate with Mike DeWine would set the tone for the rest of the campaign. In less than an hour on that Sunday morning of October 1, 2006, Sherrod proved he was more than up to the challenge of being a United States senator. And others took notice. Potential donors who'd ignored his calls for weeks were suddenly sending checks. Some reporters and columnists started writing about how, short of an October surprise, Sherrod looked unbeatable. And it wasn't long before the Republican National Committee virtually abandoned Mike DeWine.

Most reporters declared all the debates to be slugfests that nobody won. We didn't agree, but we didn't waste any energy lobbying, either. What mattered was how Sherrod felt after the debates, and he was flying high after
Meet the Press.

It was becoming clear to even the most jaded reporters that Sherrod's race was gaining momentum. Sometimes, they actually acknowledged it, such as in Dayton, which was the site of the second televised debate.

As Sherrod made his way down the hall and into the studio, Joanna, Dennis, and I hummed the theme song from
Rocky.
Dennis jogged behind Sherrod, rubbing his shoulders like a trainer, and I jogged backward in front of him, throwing imaginary punches to warm up our prizefighter. Sherrod was laughing, as were most of the journalists around us.

“Okay, I shouldn't tell you this,” one of them said, pointing toward the room where DeWine was getting ready. “But the mood down there is
real
different from the mood right here.”

The crowds were another indication that Sherrod was pulling ahead. Sherrod Brown supporters easily outnumbered DeWine supporters two to one at the third debate in Toledo, and the DeWine people were getting desperate. During that debate, Sherrod stopped midsentence and asked his supporters not to boo and hiss as DeWine's supporters in the audience did every time Sherrod spoke. That only made the DeWine people jeer louder.

In the last two weeks of the campaign, Sherrod got another boost. His dear friend John Kleshinski joined us on the trail. This was Jack Dover's idea, and someday we'll stop thanking him. Sherrod had warned me that the last two weeks of any campaign will drive even the most decent person to make a deal with the devil if only he'll promise to bring it all to an end. By then, you've eaten so much bad food and had so little sleep even your earlobes are bloated. Your pets sniff you as if they've never seen you in their entire lives. And everywhere you go, you're accosted, either by people who wear your opponent's T-shirts and taunt you, or by well-wishers who wear your T-shirt and want a picture with you, which you readily agree to because they've often waited two hours or more just to see you.

John was the perfect antidote to all of this. Where we saw another grinding sixteen-hour day, he saw one long party. Every morning, he'd show up at our home, clap his hands, and say, “Okay! Everybody ready? Let's go campaign!” I'd pour him a strong cup of my French roast coffee and off we'd go, our new driver, Nick Watt, leading the way.

“Hey, guys, can you believe this?” John said over and over as we traveled one last time through southern Ohio, then back through central Ohio on our way to Cleveland. “Can you believe we get to do this?”

He was, as he said, “one happy puppy.”

In Gallipolis: “Wow, how 'bout that crowd!”

In Chillicothe: “Did you
see
all those homemade signs?”

In Wapakoneta: “My God, this is history in the making!”

John had been a diabetic since he was thirteen, and his wife, Emily, worried about him constantly. She had agreed to his coming to Ohio as long as he promised to call her regularly. So four, five, six, eight times a day, he'd dial his cell phone and give her updates on the trail from the backseat of our Pacifica. “Em, I'm not kidding,” I heard him say at one point, “this is one of the most exciting things I've ever done.”

After our third day of campaigning with John, Sherrod turned to me and said, “John sure makes it a lot of fun, doesn't he?”

He made it easier, too, and I told John that as he and I were standing in the back of the room at a Democratic Party dinner in Lima.

“His step is lighter because you're here, John.”

He looked at me and smiled gently. “You think so? Really?”

“I really do.”

“Well, let me tell you something, Connie. He could not have done this without you. He knows it, we all know it. I've known Sherrod for thirty years, and he's a different man because of you.”

Now I was the one tearing up. I gave him a big hug, and then we congratulated each other for not having to sit at the head table like Sherrod. When Sherrod got up to speak, John and I gave him our full attention—even when he started talking yet again about his canary pin.

“He sure likes that pin,” John whispered.

“Mm-hmm.”

A couple of times in those last two weeks we stayed in a hotel, and on one of those nights a housekeeper popped in on John to ask if he wanted his bedclothes turned down.

“No, I can do that myself,” he said, handing her a twenty-dollar tip. She insisted that she could not take that money without doing something for him.

“Okay,” he said. “Would you say a prayer for me?”

She nodded, and asked his name. When he told her, she smiled.

“I will pray for you, John.”

“Isn't that the nicest thing?” he said the next morning, recounting the story. “Who can't use an extra prayer?”

         

A
S
O
CTOBER MARCHED ON, TWO OF
S
HERROD'S FELLOW
O
HIOANS
in Congress, Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Tim Ryan, started stumping for Sherrod throughout their districts—and beyond. A lot of Democratic heavy hitters had come to Ohio to help, too. Senators Hillary Clinton, Dick Durbin, Barack Obama, Tom Harkin, Barbara Boxer, Blanche Lincoln, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid and former senators Max Cleland and John Edwards all came to Ohio for fundraisers and rallies. So did former president Bill Clinton, Congresswoman Linda Sanchez, and political pundit James Carville. John Kerry raised more than $100,000 through two e-mails sent to supporters around the country, and Senator Dianne Feinstein raised nearly that same amount for Sherrod at a single fundraiser in her home.

Al Franken drew a huge crowd at Ohio State for Sherrod. Actor Adam Brody of the TV show
The OC
volunteered for Sherrod, as did Luke Perry, who starred on
Beverly Hills 90210.
Brody said he had been following various candidates' races on the Web and chose Sherrod's. Wherever the slight, polite young actor went, girls screamed and swooned.

Perry had a more personal tie to Ohio. He was born in Sherrod's hometown of Mansfield, and Sherrod's dad, Dr. Charles Brown, delivered him. Doc Brown was his family physician for many years, and Sherrod hung on Luke's every story about his father, who had died in February 2000.

Luke pointed to the scar on his forehead and told Sherrod, “That's where my brother stuck an arrow in my head. Your father pulled it out for me. He was always having to rescue me from something.”

We also enjoyed swapping stories with Luke about others' misperceptions of Ohioans. Whenever Sherrod and I went to California for fundraisers, inevitably someone would comment on how young and energetic we seemed. “It's like they were expecting Aunt Bee and Otis from Mayberry,” I told Luke.

“I know what you mean,” he said, grinning. “Every time someone hears I'm from Ohio, they expect me to pull out a banjo and start playing.”

Singer Carole King, a longtime friend of Sherrod's, came to Ohio for several days. She insisted that in addition to playing a fundraising concert, she would campaign for Sherrod in small rural communities. And that's exactly what she did, drawing crowds and headlines everywhere she went. My favorite moment with Carole, though, was during her concert for Sherrod in Cincinnati. We were sitting in the balcony, within view of the three hundred or so attending. When she sang “You've Got a Friend,” she asked everyone to sing along. The lights went up, and she pointed right at Sherrod. The entire crowd turned to face him as they sang the chorus, assuring Sherrod that he was not alone.

J. D. Souther and Jackson Browne came, too, for a fundraiser for the Ohio Democratic Party. When Jackson performed “I Am a Patriot,” many of those in the room wiped their eyes. It had been a long few years, full of right-wing attacks on our family values and our patriotism, and it felt so good to sing along as the nighttime breezes washed over us.

That was the fun stuff, but we squeezed it in around a full schedule of campaigning and fundraising. Sherrod was still doing a minimum of four radio interviews every weekday morning before 7:00, and then hitting the road most days by 8
A.M.
for as many public appearances as possible in front of large groups. Whenever he was in the car or between meetings, and before events started, he continued to make fundraising calls. That goal—a minimum of two hundred calls a week—did not change until the last week of the campaign.

What did change was my schedule. John Ryan had called me during the last week in September with a specific request.

“This is countdown time,” he said. “This is when Sherrod will be monitored closely at every single public event in the hopes that he'll screw up and one of the Republican trackers or a reporter can catch the mistake.”

“I thought we'd been worried about that for months,” I said.

“Well, yeah, we were, but back then we always figured we'd have the time to recover. Now, he makes a mistake, we don't have enough time to turn it around.”

I was reminded of a story one of our consultants told us early in the campaign. Right after the 1972 presidential race, the consultant was dining with a friend in a Washington restaurant. The friend pointed to a man sitting nearby and said, “There's the person who made Edmund Muskie cry.”

“That's William Loeb, the newspaper editor?”

“No,” his friend replied. “His scheduler.”

Loeb's newspaper had attacked the character of Muskie's wife. Muskie launched an emotional defense of her right outside the newspaper's office during a snowstorm. Reporters later said Muskie had cried during his speech. Muskie insisted that snowflakes had melted on his face, but the damage was done.

Our consultant's friend said Muskie broke down because he was exhausted from his unrelenting schedule.

That sort of story was why I worried about Sherrod throughout the campaign, and it was why I immediately responded to John Ryan.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.

“I want you to be with Sherrod on the road as much as possible.”

“What about things I'm already scheduled to attend?”

“I always told Shana to tell anyone requesting you in October that your schedule could change.”

“And now it has?”

“Yeah. He does better when you're with him, Connie. He laughs more, he relaxes more, he's more confident. You know it, and so does he. I think that's where we need you most.”

Shana cleared my calendar of all but the bigger events where I would be speaking to large, nonpartisan crowds. An AARP luncheon stayed on the schedule; so did a senior citizens group of about two hundred in Strongsville. I also kept my commitment to speak at a house party in Knox County after the organizers won a contest sponsored by the campaign. Whoever could guarantee the largest crowd got—ta-dah—me. Sherrod and I were always reunited as soon as possible, and staff often joked that Sherrod was quick to complain if he felt we were apart too long.

On the evening of October 15,
The New York Times
broke the story that the GOP was pulling out of Ohio.

Adam Nagourney's story, posted on the
Times
's website and then on the newspaper's front page the following day, gave us all we needed to know in the first sentence:

Senior Republican leaders have concluded that Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio, a pivotal state in this year's fierce midterm election battles, is likely to be heading for defeat and are moving to reduce financial support of his race and divert party money to other embattled Republican senators, party officials said.

DeWine, and RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, quickly scrambled to refute the claim, but the damage was done. From that moment on, reporters started covering the DeWine campaign as if it were the band on the
Titanic.

Sherrod sent this e-mail to his campaign, titled “To the Best Campaign Staff in the History of the World”:

The news in Monday's
New York Times
is incredible. All of us need to step back, take a breath, and realize what has happened: We are running against a two-term incumbent who is popular among the elite and the opinion-makers in Ohio—an incumbent who has showered so many with tax money, who outspent us on television this summer by a two-to-one margin, who has savaged us as anti-patriotic and tax-and-spend liberals (not to mention “Far Out Brown”—my favorite).

Yet the Republican National Committee has made the decision to leave our state.

This is all about what YOU have done. You have out-organized them, out-fundraised them, out-worked them. You have hit back every time he has hit—and always harder and smarter and with way better research…. You have out-scheduled them. You have beat them on the Internet and on the ground. You have beat them with fundraising and with free media. You have—I actually heard about this—shown up at his press conferences and, while acting courteously, stolen the spotlight or at least dimmed his.

You have, in a nutshell, run the most amazing campaign in the country. And John Ryan has been a superstar.