. . . And His Lovely Wife (4 page)

“It's great to see Sherrod…continuing to champion your career,” he wrote, “as in fact all we Browns have tried to do for you. Certainly I have.”

He continued, “Now is the time for all of [us] to champion Sherrod's career…. The issue is not whether he has a 51 percent chance to win; he chose a career in politics, and who ever knows that answer. What should be clear is that running alone will open up fantastic career options, which he can't get in the House.”

Charlie went on to insist that it was Sherrod's “duty” to “live his potential rather than ducking it.”

He ended with this: “I ask you, Connie, to urge Sherrod to run for the Senate.”

The constant drumbeat was beginning to take a toll on me, and on our marriage. I was starting to shut down, avoiding the topic whenever possible. Sherrod was feeling pulled in a direction that would take him away from me, from us. That was my fear, anyway, and for a while, fear reigned.

“Can't we just talk about it?” Sherrod asked in mid-September.

“Which part of ‘it' do you want to talk about?” I said. “How we'll be apart for an entire year? How I will lose my job and have to give up my career? How you could lose your job? Or how our entire lives will be splayed for public consumption and the Republican attack machine?”

Sherrod never yelled, never got angry. He was trying to figure this out, and I was responding only with my fears. I was tired of change, and the stress that came with it. I wanted to settle down into a normal life, or at least our version of normal. We had finally started living like a real married couple—one set of house keys, one house. We had one master bedroom, and his-and-her sinks in our new bathroom. We called the same front door home, and for the second time in less than two years we were giddy newlyweds. I was scared of losing what two longtime single parents had managed to find together in middle age.

Then one afternoon, for no reason I can remember, I stood in the middle of our high-ceilinged family room and thought, “This place is nicer than my parents' wildest dream for their own lives.”

And that is when I started to change my mind.

Sherrod and I fell in love not because of shared space, but, in part, because of our shared vision for the world. We earned our living in very different ways, but we fought for the same people, the same ideals. We met right after he voted against the war in Iraq and I had been writing columns to oppose it. When we first started dating, one of our rituals was to compare ugly mail on Fridays. For the first time in our lives, we had strong partners in each other to lean on, which lightened the load for both of us. Now we risked getting too comfortable, too steeped in home and hearth, instead of using that support to embolden us for the world out there, where it mattered.

Sherrod was torn about running. I knew that. But I watched as he encouraged others to run for office. I listened as he told them this was the time and Ohio was the place. And I studied his face whenever he talked to Strickland on the phone. I knew that if Sherrod didn't run, he would always wonder what might have been. I didn't want that weight tied around our marriage, or my own heart.

I talked to one of my most trusted advisers, my direct editor, Stuart Warner. Stuart edited my narrative series that was a Pulitzer finalist in 2003, and he was the editor of my columns when I won in 2005. Nobody believed more in my abilities or worked harder to drill them from the rock than Stuart. He also shared my passion for the profession, believing as I did that it was still a crucial component of democracy. I thought he'd wince when I told him that Sherrod was thinking of running. Instead, he motioned to an empty meeting room where we could talk privately.

He closed the door and said, “You aren't going to want to hear this.”

I stared at him and waited.

“Sherrod should run. This country needs him to run, and he needs you by his side to do it. You'll be a tremendous asset. Look at what you believe in. Look who you've been fighting for your entire career. That's who he'll be running for, and they will vote for him and he can win. You can always come back to this work if you want. Or you can move on to something bigger. You have nothing but options, but this is the right time, maybe the only time, for him to run.”

I was stunned, but I was also listening.

I needed to talk to Jackie.

Jackie Cassara is one of my closest friends. She is Ethel to my Lucy when she isn't being Auntie Mame, which is most of the time. She once stitched and framed for me Rosalind Russell's best line from that play: “Life is a banquet—and most of you poor suckers are starving to death.”

Nobody looked out for me more than Jackie. It was Jackie who read Sherrod's first e-mail to me and immediately announced that he was the man I would marry. On our way to my low-key wedding, she blasted the CD she'd burned for me consisting entirely of wedding show tunes, including “An Old-Fashioned Wedding” from
Annie Get Your Gun.
Merrily, we belted out Ethel Merman's lines:

I wanna wedding in a BIIIIIG church

With BRIIIIIIDES-maids and FLOWWW-er girls.

A lot of ushers in TAAAAIL coats,

Re-PORRRRR-ters and pho-TOG-raphers.

A ceremony by a bishop who will tie the knot and say:

“Do you agree to love and honor?”

Love and honor, yes, but not obey!

One of my favorite photos, taken right before our wedding, shows Jackie walking next to me in the church hallway with a clipboard in her hand, issuing orders to the very end.

The day we met to talk about the Senate race, though, started out a bit more somber.

“So, he's going to do it?” she said, her dark brown eyes burrowing into me as I stirred my coffee.

“I think he's waiting for me,” I said.

“And what are you waiting for?”

I shook my head, unable to speak, and she reached across the table, grabbed my hand, and smiled.

“Honey, you're bigger than all of this,” she said. “Bigger than your job, bigger than your fears, bigger than any attack those nuts out there want to fire at you and Sherrod.”

“I'm worried about my career.”

“You're always going to write.”

“I'm worried about our marriage.”

“You two are so in love it makes me sick, makes all of us sick. I'm not kidding, we look at you and we throw up.”

At that, I laughed.

“Besides,” she said, “I'm friends with a Pulitzer Prize winner, and that's been nice. Really. But now I want to be friends with a United States senator. Could you make that happen, please?”

One person not thrilled at all with Sherrod's renewed contemplation was Paul Hackett, an Iraq War veteran and a lawyer who nearly won the 2nd Congressional District seat in a special election after Rob Portman resigned to become U.S. trade representative in late summer of 2005. Sherrod had given Hackett money and lent him a campaign staff member. When Sherrod thought he wasn't running for the Senate, Democratic Party leaders started courting Hackett. He was telegenic and outspoken, a newcomer who attracted a lot of attention for his off-the-cuff swipes at Republicans in general and George W. Bush in particular, calling him a “son of a bitch” in one interview and a “chicken hawk” in another.

Hackett was unpredictable, which made him the darling of the media and lefty bloggers.
The New York Times
's James Dao described him as “garrulous, profane, and quick with a barked retort or a mischievous joke.”

Sherrod had initially encouraged him to run, but pulled back when he became concerned about Hackett's viability as a candidate. By September, Sherrod was sure Hackett could not beat DeWine. Hackett had not announced his candidacy for the Senate, but he had made it clear that he was seriously considering it—and he was in no mood for Sherrod Brown's change of heart. Sherrod could get in if he wanted, Hackett told reporters, but it wouldn't change his mind about his own race.

On the first Saturday in October, I did something that makes Sherrod and me laugh now, but it really mattered at the time. I was a big fan of the television series
The West Wing,
and I owned the first six seasons on DVD. Sherrod had never been a fan of the show, complaining that the characters talked too fast and that he was distracted by the “errors in fact.” He also didn't have a TV set in his Washington apartment, which further diminished his chances of becoming a
West Wing
groupie.

I pulled out Season Two, slid the first disc into the DVD player, and asked Sherrod to watch the first two episodes with me.

The first scene opens on mayhem as several in the presidential party are shot. It's dramatic, but it's not why I wanted Sherrod to watch. The first two episodes are full of flashbacks that explain how Jed Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, finally decides to work up the nerve to run for president. And he decides to run for all the right reasons, none of which have to do with his comfort level or whether he can win.

It takes him a while to get there, and at one point his wife, played by Stockard Channing, lectures a campaign staffer that the reason her husband is so irritable with everyone is because he's scared.

“He's not ready yet,” she tells him. “He'll get there, but he's not ready yet.”

In the final scene, we see how Jed Bartlett gets there, and maybe Sherrod and I were just too old to be watching a middle-aged actor have an on-screen epiphany, but we both teared up at the end.

I flicked off the TV and took Sherrod's hand.

“You have to run, don't you?”

“I really do, don't I?”

I nodded, and we held each other for a while. Then we laid down our ground rules for the grueling year ahead:

• Sherrod would run as an unapologetic progressive. No tiptoeing to the middle of the road, no caving to consultants who wanted to remake him into what Sherrod called “Republican Lite.” His message, not polls, would drive his campaign. Sherrod was going to take to the voters his fight for the working men and women of Ohio.

• We would learn from the mistakes of the Kerry campaign. Sherrod would run in all eighty-eight counties of Ohio, which included some of the most conservative pockets in the Midwest. And whenever the Republican attack machine opened fire, we would fight back—hard. No lying down for the kind of vicious Swift Boat ads that had challenged John Kerry's war service and his patriotism.

• Our marriage would remain a top priority. We would be apart during most weeks, especially for as long as I could stay at
The Plain Dealer,
but on weekends we would travel together. And whenever possible, Sherrod would sleep in our home.

He also promised to keep making my coffee in the morning, but I didn't consider that a deal breaker.

Sherrod made a few calls to family and supporters before announcing his race the following week. Reaction was swift, and devastating.

Shirley Fair, a longtime constituent who adored Sherrod, summed it up best. She walked up to me at a pancake breakfast and started to cry.

“Shirley, what is it? What's wrong?”

She grabbed my hand and squeezed hard. “Why is he doing this?” she said, nodding toward Sherrod. “Why is he leaving us? Why is he running?”

“He'll make more of a difference in the Senate, Shirley,” I said, putting both my hands on her shoulders. “He's not leaving you, he's just going to have a bigger district.”

Shirley just shook her head.

“We're all afraid,” she said, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “We're afraid he cannot win.”

It didn't take long for us to realize that Shirley had lots and lots of company.

two

Now What?

I
T TAKES MORE THAN A SUPPORTIVE SPOUSE AND FAMILY TO WAGE
a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.

We knew that.

In fact, you could take all that we knew about the upcoming campaign and it would almost match in size, scope, and importance everything we didn't know.

We knew, for example, that Ohio was a big state of more than eleven million people. What we didn't know was how it would feel to travel that state many times over folded into a made-in-America Chrysler Pacifica. Nothing against the Pacifica; it got us everywhere we needed to go in Ohio, and safely. It's just that no car is made to double as a restaurant, hotel, office, supply center, and conference room. The only thing we didn't do in the car was go to the bathroom, no matter how lost we were in rural Ohio. We also conducted ourselves like mature adults when it came to public displays of affection, which most grown-ups aren't too terribly interested in anyway after spending five hours in the car.

We also knew that Sherrod had to raise at least $14 million, most of which would go to television advertising in the last weeks of the campaign. What we didn't know was how much of that would come from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and how much Sherrod would have to raise on his own.

We knew that to raise that kind of money, Sherrod would have to be on the phone a lot. What we didn't know was that he would have to average 201 calls a week.

We knew that Mike DeWine and the Republican Party would run a nasty campaign against Sherrod. What we didn't know was what tactics they would use and just how personal they would get.

Finally, we knew that Sherrod needed the support of the national Democratic leadership, especially Senators Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid. We knew Schumer was celebrating Sherrod's entry into the race. What we didn't know, but found out fast, was that Reid was mighty unhappy with Sherrod.

As soon as Sherrod decided to run, he flew to Washington and met with Reid. It was short, and painful.

Reid had wanted Sherrod to get in far earlier, back in July, but Sherrod and I weren't ready then. So Reid had encouraged Hackett to get into the race, and Reid was understandably upset with Sherrod now.

“Harry said I've created a real mess with Paul Hackett, and I'm going to have to fix it,” Sherrod told me over the phone.

Schumer called Sherrod later and insisted that this was a temporary stumble.

“Sherrod, don't worry about this,” he said. “You're going to be fine, it'll all work out, I'm thrilled you're in.”

Sherrod sighed and thanked him.

“But Sherrod?”

“Yeah?”

“You
are
going to have to fix this mess with Hackett.”

Sherrod was deluged with reporters' calls and speculations that he had lied to Hackett and was indecisive. Many of them erroneously reported that Sherrod had entered the race after Hackett announced, when in fact Hackett had yet to declare his candidacy.

Sherrod cited “family concerns” to explain his delay in entering the race.

I pleaded with Sherrod to tell reporters it was my fault that he had waited, but he would have none of that.

“No one is entitled to the Democratic nomination,” he said. “That's what primaries are for. And no one sets my timetable but me. I'm not going to apologize for putting family first. And I'm not going to be the kind of jerk who blames his wife.”

Hackett's spokesman, Karl Frisch, told the
Dayton Daily News,
“We welcome him to the race. It's been a long time since he lost a statewide campaign.”

Even some of Sherrod's most ardent allies felt they had to part company with him, at least for a while. The most heartbreaking of these temporary breaks was with Congressman Tim Ryan, who represented Youngstown and part of Akron and was one of Sherrod's closest friends in the House. Elected at age twenty-nine, he was a two-term congressman from the blue-collar Youngstown area whom Sherrod had actively mentored. Sherrod had initially told Ryan he was not running, and when the Democratic leadership of the Senate asked Ryan to help recruit someone to run against DeWine, he pushed Hackett. Ryan felt he had given his word to Hackett, and told reporters he had to continue to support him. By the end of the campaign, Ryan was constantly at Sherrod's side, but for now, the air between them was chilly.

Sherrod called DeWine to tell him he was seeking DeWine's seat. It was a stiff but civil conversation. Paul Hackett, though, took the news of Sherrod's decision to run as if a dagger had been thrust through his shoulder blades. The
Akron Beacon Journal
's cartoonist, Chip Bok, drew Hackett with a giant “Sherrod Brown” pin as big as a sword stuck in his back.

When Sherrod had called Hackett to tell him he was running, the conversation had not gone well. Hackett was understandably steamed, and right after Sherrod declared his candidacy, Hackett made it clear that he was in, too.

“My advice to Sherrod is, ‘Come on in, the water's fine,'” he told bloggers and reporters. He also said to anyone who would listen—and that would be everybody, it seemed—that Sherrod had gone back on his word.

The coverage was starting to get to Sherrod. “Hackett's making it sound like I betrayed him.”

“Should you respond?”

Sherrod shook his head. “I'm running against Mike DeWine. He's the Senate incumbent, he's my Republican opponent, he's the guy I have to beat.”

I admired his resolve and wished it would rub off on me. Everything felt so personal, and so permanent. I wondered how we would survive all the attacks and turmoil, but Sherrod kept assuring me it would pass. While I was constantly tracking every mention of Hackett, Sherrod was focused on beating Mike DeWine. Whenever reporters asked about Hackett, Sherrod immediately pivoted to DeWine.

Local political bloggers called Sherrod everything from a traitor to a washed-up has-been. The last thing we needed, they said, was another “career politician.”

Two liberal writers felt compelled to launch spirited defenses of Sherrod. David Sirota, a rising star among progressive writers, penned blogs and op-ed pieces championing Sherrod as a national leader in the fight against unfair trade agreements. Sirota was derided for months after that by other bloggers who insisted he was a flack for Sherrod, even though Sirota never received a single penny from the campaign.

Ezra Klein, a writer for
The American Prospect
magazine, trumpeted Sherrod's progressive record in their December issue:

Brown is arguably the most prominent elected Democrat in Ohio. More important to the stereotypical netroots participant, he's an unabashed liberal. Earlier this year, he led the fight to reject the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), rendering a Republican president's trade deal nearly unable to clear the Republican-controlled Congress…. That's par for the course with Brown, one of the House's most effective, articulate spokesmen for progressive causes. A Cleveland Democrat, Brown is pro–gay marriage, pro–gun control, pro-labor, pro-choice, pro–universal health care—and unabashedly active on all these fronts, Ohio's reddish tinge be damned.

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of the blog world with
Daily Kos,
ignited another firestorm when he professed neutrality but suggested that Hackett withdraw from the race. His readers disagreed, and, in a poll, came out for Hackett 84 percent to 15 percent.

In our campaign, tension was growing between staff members who believed in the magic of the Internet and those who preferred traditional means of voter outreach. Sherrod was just growing increasingly annoyed. Some of the staff and consultants—I could never keep track of how many there were, because we still didn't have a campaign manager and so no one person was accountable for everything—encouraged him to reach out to bloggers, but he wanted to talk issues while they wanted to hammer him for running in the first place. He was frustrated, too, that they were unwilling to acknowledge his relentlessly progressive history. Sherrod had voted against the war in Iraq, for example, but most of them seemed not to care. Hackett had changed his position on the war—from opposing troop withdrawal to, a month later, supporting it—but the bloggers loved him.

Meanwhile, concerned colleagues at
The Plain Dealer
were pulling me aside and advising me to keep my mind and my options open. Better not quit your job too soon, they advised. Have you thought about what you might want to do if you don't return to the paper? they asked. Have you and Sherrod thought about life after the campaign?

It didn't take long for me to realize most of my colleagues did not think Sherrod could win. Astute journalist that I am, I figured this out after about a dozen or so of them came up to me and said, “Do you really think he can win?”

Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that Sherrod wouldn't win. He'd been in Ohio politics for more than thirty years. He knew how to run in Ohio, and he knew how to win. He had run for elected office fourteen times, and lost only once, in 1990.

My own armor of certainty suffered some dings, though, with the onslaught of fretful colleagues. I didn't dare share their concerns with Sherrod. Whenever he asked what I was hearing in the newsroom, I'd tell him the latest complaints addressed on
The Plain Dealer
's “Daynote,” a regular e-mail missive in the newsroom that encouraged meaningful discussion about our daily efforts but also included answers to such vital and anonymous questions as “Why does the water taste funny in the water fountain?” and “How come the smokers don't have to stand across the street?”

Then came the plagiarism incident. A pro-labor blogger, Nathan Newman, who actually supported Sherrod, suddenly took center stage in Ohio's Senate race for the worst of reasons. Sherrod had wanted to challenge DeWine and force him to reconsider his vote of support for Bush's latest Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, whose record on workers' rights was, to Sherrod, abysmal. Instead of an original letter being drafted (or at least one that cited its sources), staff misteps led to a section from an entry on Newman's blog being included in the letter, with no attribution. Without attribution or prior permission, it was in direct violation of office policy.

Sherrod knew nothing about the lifted material. He signed the letter, and off it went to DeWine. The DeWine campaign leaked the story to various newspapers around the state.

Four days later,
The Plain Dealer
's Steve Koff wrote a story that ran on page A4 titled “Brown's Alito letter lifted from blogger.”

“Brown's language was crisp—and was plagiarized,” Koff wrote.

Sherrod and I did not know this kind of story was coming. We found out about it like hundreds of thousands of other readers, by opening our morning
Plain Dealer.

The next day, the wire services carried the story that most other papers had chosen to ignore. One of the Cleveland TV stations teased the story twice before airing it, then led with the claim that Sherrod had “signed it in his own hand, which is plagiarism.” They filmed the piece right outside
The Plain Dealer.

In response, there was my husband, on the screen in our own living room, angrily accusing
The Plain Dealer
of “tabloid journalism”—not once, but twice.

Immediately, I called him.

“You make my life harder in the newsroom when you do that,” I said. “You have a right to be angry, but I don't work for a tabloid and I hate when you say that. Some people will see that as attacking your wife, not just her employer.”

“Sorry.”

It was a short call.

That evening, Sherrod sent a second letter to DeWine, this one carefully crafted under the watchful eye of communications director Joanna Kuebler.

This time, no word from the DeWine office.

Over the next two days, three more pieces about the plagiarism incident ran in
The Plain Dealer.
Koff's follow-up included passages from Sherrod's second letter to DeWine, and quoted blogger Newman saying he was fine with Brown's copying his work without giving him credit, which only made me groan.

That same day,
The Plain Dealer
's Jim Strang, who relished telling me that he lived in Sherrod's congressional district but had never voted for him, weighed in with an unsigned editorial titled “Rep. Brown's purloined letter.” It was a litany of complaints against Sherrod: his “dilatory decision” to enter the race, a recent miscast vote that he quickly corrected from the House floor, and then the letter.

Okay, I told myself. At least the letter was behind us.

Or not.

The next day,
Plain Dealer
cartoonist Jeff Darcy ran a six-panel cartoon on the editorial page titled “MORE SHERROD BROWN PLAGIARISM.”

Panel one: Sherrod as Hamlet, holding a skull and opining, “To be a Senate candidate, or not to be…”

Panel two: Sherrod forging his signature to the Declaration of Independence.

Panel three: Sherrod giving a speech, parroting JFK's “Ask not what you can do for your country…”

Panel four: Sherrod as Nixon, his hands up in peace signs, declaring “I am not a crook!”

Panel five: Sherrod as Charlie Brown, mortified that he has just cast a wrong vote, which had nothing to do with plagiarism, but who was I to quibble?

Panel six: Sherrod wearing a shirt with “Hackett” crossed out and “Brown for Senate” added, after having shot himself in the foot, over the caption, “Brownie, you're doin' a heckuva job.”

It was the Nixon caricature that did me in. And so I did a stupid thing. I sent an e-mail to Darcy.

You certainly have the right, Jeff, to depict my husband in any way you choose. Today's cartoon, however, broke my heart. For 30 years, Sherrod has fought for those who would have no voice and no future without him and the few other elected officials who champion the most unpopular of causes. Your cartoon attempted to liken him and all he stands for to one of the most corrupt politicians in our lifetime.