. . . And His Lovely Wife (24 page)

I got a healthy dose of humility from Michael Fox that day. Sherrod and I sat on either side of Michael, watching as a sixth-grade boy with Type 1 diabetes gave a speech. He was going on a bit, and I smiled nervously at Sherrod. I was worried that all this waiting would tire Michael.

Michael leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You know, it is going to make him feel so good to get his whole story out.” He smiled at me, and I was appropriately reprimanded. When it was Michael's turn at the microphone, he turned to the boy and said, “At any age, you feel the need to tell your story, and I consider you an inspiration.”

The standing-room-only crowd cheered, and I spotted my son, Andy, who had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes just two years earlier. Nearby, there was John Kleshinski, who'd been injecting himself with insulin since he was thirteen. They watched Michael, their faces brimming with hope, and once again I was struck by what a blessing this campaign had been for Sherrod and our entire family.

All of our kids were working hard for the campaign. Sherrod's older daughter, Emily, made the greatest sacrifice. She took a leave of absence in July from her union organizing job to help run, as a volunteer, the coordinated campaign in Ohio. Her husband, Mike Stanley, a community organizer, took an unpaid leave of absence to join Emily in Ohio, but as it turned out they were constantly separated in those last weeks. Mike organized outreach to faith-based groups and coordinated get-out-the-vote efforts. He also helped Wendy Leatherberry compile a list of more than fifty political, religious, and civic activists in Ohio who were committed to vouching publicly for Sherrod's character if he needed their support. They were part of our planned response if DeWine stooped to using the divorce allegations against Sherrod.

Andy and Stina regularly volunteered in our Columbus headquarters and canvassed numerous neighborhoods—all around full-time jobs. One of their more sobering accounts from the trail was finding entire blocks of houses where no one was registered to vote.

Elizabeth, a gifted orator, gave speeches for her dad throughout the summer. In the fall, she flew home on weekends from Columbia University to speak in more than thirty counties. We often say that if another Brown family member runs for office, it will be Elizabeth. Liz also helped to organize more than forty Columbia students who came to Ohio in the last days to volunteer for the campaign.

Caitlin, who was attending college in Ohio, had registered voters on campus and was now always armed with a roll of Sherrod stickers, pasting them on anyone who crossed her path. She was our youngest and least experienced politically, but she got into the campaign spirit. She wore makeshift “Sherrod earrings”—hoops plastered with stickers—and hosted an entire table of classmates (most of them Republicans) at the City Club debate. All of them later declared their support for Sherrod.

On so many days, Sherrod and I would hear yet another story about one of our children on the campaign trail, and it was so humbling to know these were our kids, sacrificing so much of their daily lives for a common cause. We never browbeat them into helping, never told them that they, too, should put the rest of their lives on hold. But all of them, including Michael and Stina, stepped up in ways that Sherrod and I only now fully comprehend. What a difference they made in the campaign—and in these parents' lives.

Sherrod's entire family was involved, too, and he never tired of supporters telling him about an event where they met his mother or one of his brothers. Throughout the campaign Bob represented Sherrod, giving speeches at dozens of events. Charlie organized the seven counties around their hometown of Mansfield. Charlie's wife, Anne Swanson, came from Maryland to Ohio, too, passing out Sherrod Brown emery boards bundled with helium balloons to dozens of hair salons. Anne also raised significant money for the campaign.

The only thing distracting us from all the mounting excitement was our fear that DeWine might still go up with an ad recycling the old divorce allegations against Sherrod. We had our own ad, of course, with Sherrod's ex-wife, Larke, our daughters, and me, but we were still hoping we wouldn't have to use it. After the City Club debate, one of DeWine's staffers told the Toledo
Blade,
“The divorce is on the table.” After that, John Ryan, Joanna, and Dennis had called every television station in the state, and nearly all of them agreed that we could switch to our divorce ad if DeWine went up with his.

It was only on the Friday evening before the election that John Ryan could put our fears to rest. The deadline had passed, he said. Mike DeWine had run out of time. There would be no divorce ad.

That weekend, I finally lost my temper with a TV reporter and cameraman who chased us out of a church service in Columbus to ask Sherrod about the unnamed employee from his secretary of state days. We had discussed how Sherrod should answer this, and decided that he should take the offensive and ask, “Who is this employee? Why isn't DeWine naming this person?”

The reporter pushed, insisting that she was just reporting the news. When the camera turned off, I turned on her.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said. “This is not reporting, this is regurgitating unfounded, anonymous attacks from a desperate candidate.”

“I'm just doing my job,” she said.

“I'm a journalist, and I say you're not doing your job,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, laughing, and then made quotation marks in the air with her fingers: “You're a ‘journalist.'”

A
Dayton Daily News
reporter was standing with us, and she immediately reprimanded the TV reporter. “Actually, she really is a journalist, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist.”

The TV reporter blanched. “Look, this wasn't my idea. It was another reporter and she couldn't come so I had to come in her place…”

I felt a tug on my sleeve. It was poor John Kleshinski, trying to rescue me. “We gotta go, Connie.”

“In a minute.”

“No, now. We gotta go
now.
”

He all but dragged me to the car.

“Did you hear what she said?”

“Yup,” said John, as Sherrod chuckled in the front seat.

“That is so wrong!”

“Yup,” said John. “It really is.”

“I could have taken her, John.”

John smacked his forehead in mock horror. “Think of the headlines, Connie,” he said. “Think of the headlines.”

twenty

The Middle Class Wins

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP EARLY ON
E
LECTION
D
AY, MY FIRST SURPRISE
was that I had ever fallen asleep. The second surprise was finding that, after all we'd been through, I wasn't so much nervous as just excited. Finally, the day we'd been working toward for more than thirteen months was here.

For most of the campaign, whenever I thought about Election Day my chest would tighten and—poof!—my appetite would disappear, and I'd look for the nearest chair. I imagined a day of excruciating length, full of horror stories about voter intimidation and malfunctioning voting machines. I saw myself sprouting gray hairs like sea oats and wringing my hands into putty as the results trickled in.

Sherrod and I had fielded hundreds—really, hundreds—of questions, not just in Ohio but across the country, about Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's attempts, real and imagined, to suppress voter turnout. Blackwell had gained a national reputation for himself by 2006. Several times, he had changed the rules for casting a provisional ballot, which is used when a voter shows up at the wrong polling place, and then he fought efforts to count them. He also tried to stop independent groups, including the League of Women Voters, from registering people to vote.

Far too many Americans doubted that Ohio could have a fair election. It was impossible to dismiss their concerns out of hand, and not just because of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s troubling piece in
Rolling Stone
magazine in the summer of 2006 that detailed these and other problems in Ohio's 2004 election. I'd seen firsthand Blackwell's attempts to disenfranchise voters. In 2004 I had wanted to run a reprint of Ohio's voter registration form with my column. The goal was to encourage voters of every political ilk in northeastern Ohio to register. Blackwell, though, clearly didn't want more people registering in the most Democratic part of the state. He was a Republican, and also George W. Bush's Ohio campaign chair—just like his political counterpart in Florida, Katherine Harris.

Blackwell had said he would not accept any completed voter registration forms on newsprint because the paper “wasn't heavy enough.” I called all seven county boards of elections in our circulation area, and to a person they said they would defy Blackwell and accept the form. I'll never forget what one of them said: “We just want to encourage as many people as possible to vote.”

Blackwell backed down in 2004 as soon as he counted heads and realized his own crowd was against him. Thousands of voters registered using the
Plain Dealer
form.

During the 2006 campaign, Sherrod always acknowledged concerns about election fraud, but then insisted that he and all the Democratic candidates on the state ticket would win by a large enough margin to thwart any attempt to taint the tally. That didn't always assuage the fears of those who couldn't help but wonder how secure any election could be when the guy overseeing it was also the Republican candidate for governor.

Now, two days before the election, John Ryan e-mailed his final words of encouragement to the campaign staff, which included this cautionary note:

Election Day—For those who have not been through the drill before, get ready to hear 1,000 rumors on Election Day. Normally none of these turn out to be true. Just take a breath before passing on something you hear as the truth. Make sure you report things to the person you are reporting to that day but keep focused on bringing people out to the polls.

Election Protection—This year we have an effective vehicle to pass along any potential voter problems. Have voters call 888-DEM-VOTE. We have a bank of lawyers in Columbus who will help follow through.

By Election Day, our own polls showed that Sherrod was going to win. Since mid-October, Sherrod had been telling me he would win by double digits. The morning of the election, he told me he'd win by 12.68 points. He said it exactly like that. The process he used to conjure up that number involves a lot of political acumen and a little bit of magic.

First, Sherrod tallied what he called his
W
and
L
days. Starting March 1, Sherrod asked himself every single day, “What do I have to do to win?” At the end of the day, he'd evaluate his efforts. By his measure, he usually had either a winning day or a losing day. Winning days got a
W.
Lots of good press coverage earned a
W,
for example, as did any day when he raised a lot of money with a single event. Losing days were marked with an
L,
such as when DeWine got a newspaper's endorsement or whenever Bush came into Ohio for a fundraiser.
W
days made for a chirpy Sherrod.
L
days made for long nights as he rehashed mistakes and missteps. Fortunately, the
W
days far outnumbered the
L
days.

This was only the beginning of Sherrod's equation for victory. He also looked at polling trends—his numbers had steadily climbed as DeWine's steadily fell; then he weighed other factors from March 1 to November 5: his 411 TV hits, 668 radio interviews, and the 7,277 handwritten letters he'd sent to a wide range of Ohioans, from anyone turning ninety or celebrating more than fifty years of marriage to newly minted Eagle Scouts. (By the way, once you're an Eagle Scout, you're always an Eagle Scout, which I learned after I spoke to a roomful of men and mentioned that Sherrod “used to be” an Eagle Scout. Oh, the furor. Learn from me.)

After Sherrod calculated those numbers, he did that thing he does in his head that I don't understand and he can't explain, and decided he would beat DeWine 56.34 to 43.66, a 12.68 percentage margin. He wrote this equation in his calendar the night before the election.

How accurate was he?

To quote a postelection e-mail from John Kleshinski:

“Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back.”

         

O
UR TWO YOUNGEST KIDS,
C
AITLIN AND
E
LIZABETH, WENT WITH
us on Election Day to vote at 9
A.M.
at the Avon Public Library, which is about a half-hour's drive west of downtown Cleveland. Lots of cameramen, photographers, and reporters followed us around, which made me wince for all the other residents in our precinct who were just trying to cast their vote. Liz, who grew up with such hoopla, took it in stride. Cait, not to be outdone by her sophisticated (and beloved) stepsister, also acted as if it were the most normal thing in the world to have a gaggle of strangers document your every
tap-tap-tap
of the electronic touch screen.

Joanna, our intrepid communications director, stepped up when they tried to photograph Sherrod and me voting in plain sight.

“Hey, sorry, but the voting booth is still private, even if there isn't any, well,
booth,
” she said, shooing them off to a safe distance. I heard Sherrod talking to someone and looked up to find my husband, seized by the spirit of Gandhi, shaking the hand of our neighbor with the DeWine sign in his yard. Unable at that moment to be the change I wanted to see in the world, I looked back down and kept voting.

We later learned that out of seven hundred or so votes cast in our Republican precinct, Sherrod won by fifty. I sleep a little better knowing that.

Soon after voting, we parted with our daughters. Liz went to work the phone banks at one of our campaign headquarters while Caitlin canvassed neighborhoods in the rain with our driver, Nick Watt. Emily was still in Columbus and Mike was in Marion, both of them coordinating the get-out-the-vote efforts. Andy and Stina canvassed in Columbus. All of our children would later join us at our hotel.

After visiting two more polling places, Sherrod and I arrived around 1
P.M.
at our hotel room at the Crowne Plaza in downtown Cleveland. The Crowne was directly across from Cleveland Public Hall, where Sherrod's victory party was scheduled to take place later in the evening. We never let ourselves call it anything other than that. Dennis Eckart headed up the planning.

“You're going to love it,” he kept saying throughout the weekend, without ever providing any details. When we asked our scheduler, Shana Johnson, she just repeated his assurance. “Really,” she said, “you're going to love it.”

We had decided just before the weekend not to join the coordinated campaign celebration in Columbus, the state capital, because the Ohio Democratic Party had not reserved a big enough space to accommodate all who wanted to attend. We didn't want so many volunteers and contributors closed out after a long year of such hard work. Besides, we lived in northeastern Ohio, where Sherrod had been a congressman for fourteen years and I had worked nearly as many years at
The Plain Dealer.
If we held the party in Cleveland, supporters throughout the northern part of the state—many of them union members who'd worked on Sherrod's campaigns for more than a decade—could join in the celebration.

Our press secretary, Ben LaBolt, initially balked at the switch, insisting the media would abandon us for the party in central Ohio. After a few calls to the press, though, he laughed at his own anxiety.

“They'll be here,” he said, beaming. “Media coverage definitely
won't
be a problem.”

We left the chaotic hotel lobby for our suite on the twenty-second floor. The campaign staff reserved a suite, which had two bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a living and dining area, as well as three televisions. No matter how many people joined us in the next few hours, we would have one bedroom reserved just for us. For two whole hours, we had the place to ourselves before dozens of family members, staff, and volunteers—not to mention a number of people we'd never seen before—found their way to our room.

Shana had ordered some food for us, and both of us started laughing when we spotted a dish of cold baked potatoes piled amid the cheese and crackers. Sherrod always asked me to bake extra whenever I made them for dinner, so that he could bring the leftovers on the campaign trail the next day. I'm afraid I've never developed a taste for the cold spuds, but Sherrod eats them like apples—much to the amusement of staff members. Apparently Shana thought he preferred his potatoes like this, and so there they were: a small mountain of stone-cold tubers.

I looked out at the overcast skies and spotted the sole wind turbine—I mistakenly called it a windmill until someone corrected me—spinning at Cleveland's Science Center. So many times Sherrod had mentioned the wind turbine in speeches as a promise of what could come to Ohio if only we focused on creating alternative energy solutions. It was a sign of the future, and I found it oddly reassuring as I watched it twirl.

Public Hall, surrounded by quiet streets, looked lifeless and abandoned. That would change, and soon. In less than three hours, the polls would close and the crowd of activists, staff, and political junkies would convene in the cavernous auditorium. Sherrod expected the networks to start calling the race a half-hour or so later.

“By eight o'clock,” he said. “They'll know it by then, unless it's close—and it's not going to be close.”

The day before, Sherrod and I had brainstormed the beginning of his victory speech. We knew that at best he had maybe two minutes to capture the attention of the media, and I encouraged him not to start with a litany of the people he wanted to thank. Politicians do that all the time, and even the objects of their gratitude start to swoon with boredom around the fourteenth name.

First, we tried a little humor. The Toledo
Blade
was the only major Ohio paper to endorse Sherrod, so we toyed with this beginning:

To the editorial boards of the
Akron Beacon Journal, The Cincinnati Post, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Dayton Daily News, The Columbus Dispatch, the Canton Repository, the Youngstown Vindicator and The Plain Dealer: I gratefully accept this endorsement from the hardworking men and women of Ohio.

When we ran it past Joanna, she laughed like crazy. Oh, ho, ho, ain't we funny?

Then she shook her head.

“Okay, I know you guys are having a little fun, letting off a little steam, but do we really want this to be our message on election night?”

Whenever Joanna started talking about “we,” the real “we” knew that we'd just found ourselves a fish that couldn't be more dead in the water.

Sherrod had scribbled some notes, but four hours before the polls closed, he had hovered but not landed. He pulled off his suit and tie and changed into a pair of his rattiest sweats in the time it took me to kick off my shoes.

“I need to write my speech,” he said, frowning as he sat down at the large wooden dining table. “I still don't know what I'm going to say.”

“Yes, you do,” I said, grabbing the notes he'd read to me a little earlier. “And it's not this.”

He looked at me and sighed.

“Think about what this means,” I said, “to you, to Ohio—and to the country.”

“Was that supposed to make me feel
less
nervous?”

I put down my own notebook and sat across from him at the table.

“Tell me a story,” I said, and that was all I had to say.

Less than thirty minutes later, Sherrod knew exactly what he wanted to say to the people of Ohio.

         

O
UR SUITE BEGAN TO FILL SHORTLY AFTER 5 P.M.
J
OANNA,
S
HANA,
Wendy, and John Kleshinski were the first to show up, mainly to go over last-minute details. Soon after that, Liz and Caitlin arrived, followed by my sisters, Leslie and Toni, who had driven together from our hometown of Ashtabula, about an hour east of Cleveland. I really wanted them with me on Election Night, and to my delight they immediately agreed. My brother, Chuck, joked that while he was a Republican willing to vote for Sherrod, he had to draw the line at sharing a stage with the guy who took on the pharmaceutical companies—one of which is his employer.