. . . And His Lovely Wife (25 page)

Les and Toni hugged me, then pulled me aside.

“We have something for you,” Les said.

“We knew Dad would want you to have it,” Toni added.

When they pulled it out of the bag, I recognized it immediately: Dad's beloved old suede jacket, the tan one he'd worn at Sherrod's rally in Ashtabula. It was the same jacket he had on in the last photo I took of him, the picture that popped up on the television screen during my interview on the
Today
show only four days after he had died. That same photo was in a frame in our center hallway, and I never walked past it without silently saying, “Hi, Dad.”

I held up the jacket and noticed that his “Sherrod Brown” sticker was still over the left pocket.

I barely got out the words “Thank you,” then walked into a nearby bathroom and closed the door. I pulled on Dad's jacket, sat on the counter, and had a good cry.

Soon after that, Jackie and Kate showed up, and I nearly teared up again at the sight of our two close friends. Jackie took one look at me and said, “Oh, dolly, can you believe it? You're almost there.” She hardly ever left my side throughout the rest of the evening.

By 7
P.M.
or so the place was buzzing. All of our kids and Sherrod's family had arrived. I watched as Emily and Elizabeth, veterans of so many campaigns, hovered around their dad like butterflies. Repeatedly they patted his back, whispered in his ear, and leaned on his shoulder. They had waited a long time for this night, this victory.

John Ryan called on my cell phone to let us know that a close friend of Mike DeWine's had called Ryan and asked for Sherrod's private cell phone number.

“Why?” I asked.

To his credit, Ryan pretended I hadn't just asked one of the more stupid questions of the campaign.

“Well, probably so that Mike can call him,” he said.

Silence.

And then the heavens opened up and the choir began to sing.

“Oh, oh, right,” I said, finally catching on. “So that he can concede.”

“Right.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“You gave him the number?”

“Yeah,” said Ryan, who was really earning overtime with this call. “I gave it to him, but maybe you should hold on to Sherrod's phone to make sure he gets the call.”

“Which phone? One of the BlackBerries, or the cell phone?”

“The cell phone. I figured you could fit that one in your pocket.”

That was John Ryan, always thinking of the candidate's wife, even when she wasn't thinking at all.

I shared Ryan's news with Sherrod, who nodded silently and handed me his phone. Then we excused ourselves from the increasingly crowded part of the suite and went into our bedroom so that we could shower and change.

At about 7:40, ten minutes after the polls had closed, Sherrod and I sat down on the edge of our bed and said a prayer before rejoining the group, who were already in a celebrating mood.

As always, we faced each other and joined hands, then bowed our heads as we thanked God for getting us through this challenging year. We prayed for strength, ours and Mike DeWine's, and then we held each other for a moment, until we heard a cheer swell up outside our bedroom door.

Sherrod looked at me quizzically. The clock on the bedside stand said it was only 7:45.

We opened the door and found Joanna standing inches away.

“Okay,” she said, smiling, “it's premature, but CBS has just declared you the winner.” We looked up at the large-screen TV and saw the check mark under a portrait of Sherrod. We turned to each other, and as soon as I saw the tears in Sherrod's eyes I wrapped my right arm around his neck and buried my face in his shoulder, as I so often do in our more private moments.

Then we heard it: the
kachick-kachick-kachick
of cameras, their lights flashing over and over.

We looked at the group of photographers crouched in front of us, then looked at Joanna, whose own eyes were on the brink of flooding.

“I forgot to tell you they were here,” she said. “Remember? They wanted to come up for a few minutes? We talked about this.”

Sherrod and I both shook our heads and started to laugh. The next day, versions of that photo—capturing us clearly overcome with emotion—ran in newspapers across the country, including
The New York Times.

The
Dayton Daily News
's Jessica Wehrman best described that moment, and what it meant for me, a few days later:

It was a familiar and comfortable stance for Schultz and Brown, who've been married two years; one Schultz knows viscerally.

Until she opened Wednesday's paper, though, she'd never seen what that familiar pose looked like to the outside world.

It was a second when both realized that their long hours campaigning had resulted in a victory, and it was duly recorded and put on the wires for all newspapers to run in their morning editions.

And it made Schultz realize, yet again, what a different sort of marriage hers is—where a moment of victory or defeat can be captured by the cameras; where crowds press against them at campaign events, people taking pictures with cell phones; where perfect strangers recognize her and her husband.

“It wasn't our moment,” Schultz said. “We don't get that anymore.”

It was merely an observation of how much our lives, and our marriage, had changed.

         

M
INUTES AFTER
CBS
DECLARED
S
HERROD THE WINNER
, S
ENATORS
Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer called Sherrod to congratulate him. Shortly after that, Hillary Clinton was on the phone.

“Tell Connie not to let anyone tell her she can't have her career,” she said to Sherrod, who immediately repeated her advice. Several women in the suite applauded. Granted, they were my friends or relatives, but still. Shortly after that, our Jos. A. Bank salesman, Allen Roy, called. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don't forget to straighten Sherrod's tie before he gives his victory speech. The entire nation will be watching. Let's not have them focused on the crooked tie.”

Even though DeWine's friend had called early in the evening for Sherrod's phone number, by 10
P.M.
he apparently still hadn't persuaded DeWine to make the call. We were waiting for even a hint of a concession. The crowd across the street was growing, but Ryan was worried we'd lose a number of them if Sherrod didn't show up soon. Joanna fretted over losing precious television airtime before the eleven o'clock news. “Once the news starts, we lose them,” she said.

Ryan looked at his watch and gave us a rare order. “We wait until ten-thirty. If we don't hear from DeWine by then, we're going over to the hall and Sherrod's going to give his speech.” Ted Strickland had already delivered his victory speech as Ohio's next governor.

Meanwhile, we crammed around a TV set, watching as one Democrat after another captured a congressional seat. Sherrod leaned in and whispered, “This could have turned out a lot differently, baby.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed. We always knew it was a gamble, but once we made the decision, we never let ourselves look back. Until Election Night, that is, when we watched the best-case scenario play out before our eyes.

The Democratic Senate victories were starting to pile up, too. Bernie Sanders took Vermont; Bob Casey beat Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania; Amy Klobuchar won in Minnesota; Sheldon Whitehouse took the Rhode Island seat from Lincoln Chafee. Claire McCaskill's race against incumbent Jim Talent was still too close to call, but we were confident she would win because the votes in heavily Democratic St. Louis had not yet been reported. Jon Tester of Montana and Jim Webb in Virginia, both of them locked in neck-and-neck races, were destined for all-nighters. Harold Ford in Tennessee was the only certain Democratic defeat.

As our suite grew louder, I set Sherrod's cell phone to ring-and-vibrate and then held it in my hand throughout the evening. I had only one job that night, and I wasn't going to screw it up. Around 10:20, Ryan pulled us aside. “I think we'd better head on over. We can't wait forever for DeWine to call.”

It took several elevator rides to get everyone down to the lobby, and we were walking across East Sixth Street in downtown Cleveland when my hand started to vibrate. I looked in the cell phone window: The area code was from DeWine's home county. Immediately I pulled Sherrod back to the sidewalk.

“It's DeWine,” I said, handing him the phone. Ryan and Joanna began shushing everyone as Sherrod flipped open the phone.

“Hello?” Pause. “Mike. Thank you for calling.”

For the next few minutes, we stood silently around Sherrod as he talked with the man we'd known only as his opponent for the last thirteen months. Sherrod listened as DeWine congratulated him on running a strong race and told him, twice, “You're going to love this job.”

“I know how hard this call is, Mike,” Sherrod said. “I had to make this kind of call to Bob Taft in 1990, and it wasn't easy. I appreciate that you did this.”

DeWine asked Sherrod to wait until he delivered his concession speech before he took the stage. Sherrod agreed, and we headed over to the hall to wait.

Sherrod's colleague and cherished friend Stephanie Tubbs Jones effortlessly segued from preacher to stateswoman to stand-up comedienne. We arrived just as she was pantomiming DeWine's lockstep with Bush to uproarious applause. As soon as the large video screen over the stage began televising DeWine's concession speech, though, the hall grew silent. Sherrod and I watched on a small TV monitor backstage.

Against the backdrop of a large American flag, surrounded by his family, DeWine delivered a somber speech.

“In this race we fought hard,” he said. “We did everything we could do, but it just wasn't meant to be. This was not the year. We could not win.”

He spoke for a few more minutes as his wife, Fran, stood by his side. While some on the stage were wiping away tears, she looked the way I'd hoped I would if the roles had been reversed: already poised to be the rock her husband would need. As I watched, I couldn't help but feel I had more in common with Fran DeWine than with anyone standing around me. We are different women, as others too often had gleefully pointed out, but we both love our husbands and had stood by them through a grueling race. Nobody else really understood what we had been through, but our loyalty to our husbands also meant that those were stories we would never share with each other.

During the campaign, some reporters and columnists had predicted political death for the loser in this race, but DeWine clearly wasn't buying that theory. He ended his speech by suggesting he would be back:

“There is unfinished business in this state, and I believe, the good Lord willing, that I have unfinished business, too.”

He never mentioned Sherrod.

As soon as DeWine finished, the stage at Public Hall went dark. Dennis Eckart gave us last-minute instructions: We were to wait until his son, Eddie, introduced us over the loudspeaker. Sherrod and I would then walk out on center stage together, followed by our family and friends. I was to stand to Sherrod's left.

“You won't be able to miss your marker,” Dennis said, grinning. “I marked a strip of tape on the floor just for you.” He seemed awfully excited about a strip of tape, but then again, we were excited about everything that night.

Sherrod and I walked behind the black curtain. I closed my eyes, trying to will myself to live in the moment, in this moment, to breathe it all in so that I'd never forget everything that was about to happen.

Somewhere, drums started to beat the prelude to Aaron Copland's
Fanfare for the Common Man
as a booming, faceless voice (that of Eddie) announced with high drama:

“He fights for the middle class.”

Sherrod looked at me and grinned.

“He'll stand up for Ohio.”

We both started giggling.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the next senator from the great state of Ohio—the Honorable Congressman Sherrod Brown, and his wife, Connie Schultz!”

The curtains parted, and out we walked into the blinding lights. The ceiling rained confetti as the music blasted and hundreds of supporters clapped, cheered, screamed, and even cried at the sight of their next senator.

Fighting tears, I turned to Sherrod and shouted the first thing that came to mind.

“Doesn't this music remind you of the scene in
The Natural
when Robert Redford hits the home run and smashes the lights and the crowd goes crazy?”

“Robert Redford?” Sherrod shouted.

“Yeah.”

“Robert Redford is here?”

“No,” I yelled. “He was in
The Natural.
”

“Right here?”

“No,” I said, suddenly realizing how ridiculously
out
of the moment I had just traveled. “Never mind!”

The crowd started chanting, “Sher-rod! Sher-rod! Sher-rod!” which made the object of their affection turn a fetching shade of fuchsia.

“All right, all right,” he said, laughing as he gestured for them to stop. This only inspired a louder round of “
Sher-rod! Sher-rod! Sherrod!
”

He opened the leather binder that held his notes, and I looked down to find my stage marker. As soon as I saw the writing on the foot-long strip of tape, I knew why Eckart had been so pleased with himself: “THE LOVELY WIFE.”

Finally, the room grew quiet, and Sherrod uttered the twelve words that would be repeated in stories and video clips around the country: “Today, in Ohio, in the middle of America, the middle class won.”

The room exploded.

He praised their progressive values and the work they did to help change the country, and then he repeated what had become the mantra of all the Democratic candidates in Ohio: “As Ohio goes in '06, so goes the nation in '08.”

Again, the crowd erupted, which it continued to do throughout his ten-minute speech. Sherrod reminded them that most politicos thought he could not win when he got into the race, that they had advised him to abandon his progressive politics for the middle of the road.