. . . And His Lovely Wife (9 page)

I looked out at the crowd and decided to tell them a story about the man behind the office. In late 2003, the Medicare drug bill, which Sherrod had opposed, finally passed in the middle of the night, by one vote. Sherrod and many other Democrats had fought hard against the bill, which they believed would hurt the many senior citizens who would no longer be able to afford adequate health care. Even the Republicans knew that most Americans opposed the bill, and so the vote was held open against House rules into the early morning hours, until enough members had been browbeaten or threatened into changing their votes.

Sherrod finally left the House chambers around six in the morning, and he called me from a street corner in Washington, his voice raw.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

He drew a deep breath, and kept pausing between words. “I just crossed paths,” he said. “I just crossed paths with a chambermaid. She had to be in her sixties, she was wearing her uniform and standing at a bus stop.”

I waited for him to finish.

“I couldn't look her in the eye,” he said, his voice breaking. “I couldn't look at her because I knew what we'd just done to her.”

The crowd grew silent as I shared that story about Sherrod. “That's my husband,” I said. “And that's your next senator.”

Later that evening, Sherrod and I were finally together and decided to stop at the Blue Danube Tavern in downtown Columbus before checking into our hotel for the night. The place was packed, and Sherrod pulled out of his inside breast pocket a stack of campaign brochures and started working the room. A few moments later, he came back with a stunned look on his face.

“What happened?”

“It's gonna be a long campaign, baby.”

He had stopped at a table of middle-aged women who had clearly been eating and drinking for a while. All but one of them were friendly, but that one was a real doozy.

“Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” she asked Sherrod.

“Democrat.”

She flipped the brochure back at him.

“I guess you find Democrats repugnant,” he said.

She nodded.

“Well, the Republicans have done such a fine job running Ohio,” he said.

She scowled at Sherrod. “At least they don't fuck everything that moves and then deny it.”

Proving once again why he, and never I, could be a candidate for elected office, Sherrod just walked away. When he recounted the story, I immediately whirled around to get a look at her. She stared right back at me, but her dinner companions looked away.

“I could take her,” I said.

“Honey.”

“Well, I could.”

We looked at each other and laughed. Not hard, mind you, but we managed a chuckle.

Long campaign, indeed.

         

T
HE NEXT DAY, WE STOPPED AT A
B
OB
E
VANS RESTAURANT ON THE
way back to Cleveland. Sherrod loves Bob Evans, or at least he did as long as he could order their vegetable stir-fry. Recently, though, they had dropped it from the menu, and whenever we were hungry we searched for a Bob Evans so that we, and any staff member unlucky enough to be with us, could fill out a complaint form requesting the return of vegetable stir-fry.

I blame the waitress named Michelle. I don't remember which Bob Evans she worked at, but I will never forget the spark she lit under my husband when she answered his question about the vegetable stir-fry.

“If you want it back, you have to fill out a complaint card.”

“Will that do any good?”

She nodded her head with the authority of a woman who's seen things. “That's what happened with Italian dressing. Enough people filled out the complaint card and they brought it back.”

From then on, Sherrod put us all to work. “We have to fill these out,” he said, passing out the cards to all of us at the table. “Tell them we want the vegetable stir-fry back on the menu.”

Sherrod always wrote the same thing: “Please bring back the vegetable stir-fry.”

I always wrote the same thing, too: “Please bring back the vegetable stir-fry so that my husband will stop complaining and I can eat my fruit plate in peace.”

During this particular Bob Evans stop, an elderly woman wearing a cobalt blue sweater that matched her eyes approached Sherrod as he munched on a roll.

“Congressman?”

Sherrod looked up and smiled.

“My future son-in-law lives in Franklin County,” she said. “For three years, he's been trying to get his Social Security. I don't know if this is something you can help with?”

Sherrod ripped off a corner of his placemat and wrote down his name and government office number. “I'm not promising anything, but we'll see what we can do,” he said.

She smiled. “I'm hoping he'll be my son-in-law down the road.”

“Well, I'm not talking to him about that,” Sherrod said, grinning.

“Well, okay, then,” she said.

I watched her walk away and couldn't help but think of the angry woman we'd encountered less than twenty-four hours ago.

Sherrod, though, had other things on his mind.

“Did you fill out the complaint card?” he said as we gathered our belongings to leave. “Remember, the people brought back Italian dressing, and the people can bring back vegetable stir-fry, too.”

Despite our best lobbying efforts, though, we have yet to see vegetable stir-fry at a Bob Evans. Sherrod, however, remains hopeful.

five

Focus

W
HEN
S
HERROD CALLED FROM THE BED IN OUR TINY
W
ASHINGTON
efficiency, his voice sounded even huskier than usual. It was early March, seven-thirty in the morning, and he was clearly sick. And exhausted.

“I don't want to move,” he said. “I don't want to do anything.”

This was not the Sherrod I knew. I'm the one who rolls out of bed and, too often, right onto the floor. He springs to life like the first robin sprinting across the lawn.

The day before, he had visited the doctor, who prescribed cough syrup with codeine to control the hacking and give him a chance to sleep. Normally, Sherrod won't even take Tylenol for a headache, but he was worn out from coughing throughout the previous night and running nonstop all day along the Capitol's marble floors and stairways, which he insisted on climbing for the pedometer steps.

The codeine, though, had offered no reprieve. Two doses, at bedtime and then in the middle of the night, couldn't keep him from tossing and turning most of the night. I had a feeling more than the head cold was impairing his sleep.

“You're worried all the time, that's probably why,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “This morning John Ryan sent me an e-mail. Looks like Hackett was on
The Daily Show
last night.”

He hesitated for a moment.

“They said Hackett was twenty points ahead in the polls when he dropped out.”

“You're kidding,” I said. Paul Hackett had actually
trailed
Sherrod by at least that much by the time he dropped out of the race, but that wasn't the point. We were paying too much attention to every poll that popped up—and to Hackett's continuing coverage. He was out of the race, but not yet out of Sherrod's head.

A recent column by
Newsweek
's Eleanor Clift had suggested, as other journalists had, that Hackett had dropped out because Democratic Party officials were circulating rumors meant to impugn his military service in Iraq.

“The only way the Republicans can win in Ohio,” she wrote, “is if the Democrats blow it, and they're working at it. Democratic Party leaders pressured Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett to withdraw from the Senate race (in favor of a veteran congressman) with undercover operatives launching a whisper campaign about Hackett's service that was reminiscent of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Kerry—and equally reprehensible.”

Who were these “undercover operatives”? And what were the rumors? It was much easier to suggest than to report. Some journalists repeated Hackett's charge that Sherrod knew about the rumors and encouraged their dissemination, which was false. The only time a staff person approached us with even the hint of a rumor about Hackett's service in Iraq was in December 2005, while Sherrod and I were meeting at national Democratic headquarters in Washington. Immediately, Sherrod cut this person off in midsentence.

“I don't want to hear anything about this, and I don't want you or anyone else on my campaign involved in spreading any of these rumors about Paul Hackett. Period.” When we later suspected he had violated Sherrod's order, he was fired.

All of this was catching up with Sherrod. “You aren't feeling well,” I told him. “You had a fever two nights ago, you've got a bad cold, and everyone's on you all the time about fundraising. It's hard to have perspective right now.”

I reminded him that we weren't alone in this race. “If you're meant to win, God will help make it possible. We have to have faith.”

“I need to have better call lists,” he said, referring to the donor contact lists regularly generated by our fundraising team. “That's what I need.” His response threw me, coming from the man who still played songs from a Lutheran hymnal on our piano in the living room to relax.

I tried to remember the last time he'd done that, and came up empty.

Then I tried to recall the last time I'd heard Sherrod whistle. He used to whistle all the time—at his desk at home, in the kitchen, walking the dog, even in the shower.

For weeks now, he'd been silent.

“I really, really love you,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said quietly. “I love you, too.” I knew he had to get ready for a breakfast meeting, so we agreed to talk later in the day.

I hung up the phone and pushed away from the kitchen table, no longer hungry for the English muffin in front of me. I walked down the hall to my office. What was happening to us?

Signing on to the computer, I started searching my e-mail for Google alerts, looking for references to
The Daily Show.
There it was, lodged between the daily morning newspaper alerts and spam. It turned out to be not a newspaper story, but an account by a blogger who described himself as “a magazine editor, a freelance writer, a capitol hill staffer, a game designer and a history professor” and proud contributor to another blog titled
The Elitist Pig.
What he didn't mention was his championing of the far right on many other blogs, which only five minutes of research revealed.

Nevertheless, he now had the political blogosphere's attention. “Today I was reminded yet again,” his blog entry began, “that you don't really ‘get' the news unless you watch
The Daily Show
on Comedy Central.” He repeated Hackett's accusation that Democratic leaders “did everything they could to persuade him not to run and eventually tried to sink his campaign with dirty tricks during the primary.”

I tried finding an actual clip of the show. I checked out the
Daily Show
site. Nothing. I clicked onto a blog search engine, and started typing various word combinations in search of the video clip.

Then I caught myself.

What was I doing? I was getting all worked up about something we should just ignore. Sherrod was running for the Senate because he cared about what was happening to so many Americans who were suffering under their own government's policies, and those Americans should be our focus. Sherrod knew that, and so did I, but somehow we kept letting ourselves get distracted by static.

I needed to get a grip.

I remembered what Jack Dover, Sherrod's beloved chief of staff in the congressional office, told me over a recent dinner in Washington. It was a rare moment to relax. We were waiting for Sherrod to show up, so Jack had ordered a bottle of merlot and I could feel the warmth rise in my cheeks as I settled back and enjoyed the time alone with him and his wife, Agnes, a lawyer who is as smart and kind as they come. She nodded sympathetically as Jack leaned over and forecast my future:

“You are going to be such a different person at the end of this campaign,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“You'll see.”

I remember wishing he'd said that with a smile.

Now, here I was, only a few weeks later, pounding the keyboard in search of more distractions.

Such a different person.
The memory made me shiver.

I logged off the computer and pushed away from my desk.

Focus,
I told myself.
Focus.

O
NE WEEK LATER,
S
HERROD OFFERED A GLIMPSE INTO THE FEAR
that I hadn't quite known was haunting him.

Joanna, our driver Walter O'Malley, and I were in the car with him, driving back to Cleveland. Sherrod had given a speech to 250 progressives in Solon, a suburb southeast of Cleveland. Something had happened to Sherrod in that room, and we were all trying to figure out what. For the first time in weeks, he was on fire.

We had been astonished to find a standing-room-only crowd in this suburb, which was known as much for its lack of diversity as for its tremendous growth in the last two decades. Sherrod poked his head into the room, turned around, and started laughing.

“Can you believe this?” he said, his eyes wide. “In
Solon
?”

Sherrod was lively and quick during his short talk, ending his speech by promising two headlines in newspapers across the country on November 8:

“The first headline, in
The New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times,
in the
Chicago Tribune
and
The Miami Herald,
is going to say, ‘Democrats take back the House and Senate.'”

The crowd cheered.

“The second headline is going to say, ‘Ohio Turns Blue.'”

That brought the crowd to its feet. Sherrod glanced over at me and grinned. Then he started taking questions, and as he answered, the audience grew more animated.

One man stood up and asked how Sherrod planned to defeat “DeWine the moderate.” Sherrod lunged: Mike DeWine, he said, was no moderate.

“Mike DeWine voted for the Iraq War,” he said. “I voted against it.” The audience exploded.

“Mike DeWine voted for the energy bill. I voted against it.” More cheers.

“Mike DeWine voted to privatize Social Security. I voted against it.” Applause, more cheering. Clearly, though, the war was his home-run line.

I leaned over to Joanna, who had the same immediate response.

“He needs to reverse the order on that,” I said. She showed me the sheet of paper in her hand and laughed. “War last, not first,” she had written.

I watched my husband in front of those cheering people and smiled at the change that was unfolding right before my eyes. He was more relaxed, no longer tripping over his words. He was defiant one minute, funny the next. In a wise, measured voice, he talked about how he and the Democrats would be different. Not once did he stumble, nor did he get that weary look on his face when someone challenged him.

I looked over at Walter, who flashed me his thumbs-up grin. He saw the change, too.

The crowd gathered around Sherrod afterward, and many of them approached me, too, buzzing about his “great speech” and how excited they were to work for him. One man, an African American businessman still wearing his three-piece suit and tie, told me he had never heard Sherrod speak before. “Now that I've heard him, I want to help him,” he told me. “I filled out a volunteer card. Count me in.”

On the drive home, Sherrod listened for a few minutes from the front seat as Walter, Joanna, and I offered our post-speech review, peppered with praise for how strong he seemed.

“You had them hoppin' like popcorn in a skillet,” I said. He rolled his eyes and grinned.

“What's changed?” I asked him. “You were a lot gutsier tonight.”

Sherrod nodded, leaned back into his seat, and looked through the windshield straight ahead as he spoke. “I've been afraid,” he said.

Walter and Joanna were silent. I was surprised he was willing to admit any fears in front of staff members, even Walter and Joanna, two of our most trusted confidants.

“Why?” I asked.

I was wondering if he would repeat what he had been sharing privately with me during our early morning talks at home in recent days. It was always in that quiet time, when the neighborhood was still dark and we could hear the hoot owl calling from the trees out back, that Sherrod would occasionally reach over, grab my hand, and softly say, “I woke up scared today.”

The first time this happened, I let it rattle me. I was used to Sherrod the warrior. He had always been up for the fight when it came to politics.

Since the campaign had started, he had admitted to occasional fears, but they revolved around the mammoth task of fundraising. Could he raise the $10 million to $14 million everyone said he needed to win? It sounded bigger than both of us.

A few times lately, though, he had also admitted that he was worried that one little mistake on his part could result in an avalanche of bad press that would bury him. We'd talk it through until the clock warned us we were running out of time, and then he'd leave for another day of battle—armed with his briefing book and a steaming bowl of oatmeal.

On our way home from the rally in Solon, though, he talked about a different kind of fear.

“I'm afraid of letting down all these people counting on me,” he said. “All the people showing up at these events who tell me they're there because they believe I can win. All the people on the campaign staff, and the ones who work in my government offices.”

“Honey,” I said, but he cut me off.

“Think about it,” he said. “Think about how many people won't have jobs if I lose. Think about all those people who were so heartbroken after 2004 and here they are again, willing to believe. Think what it will do to them if we lose.”

This was the Sherrod I knew all too well, the youngest child, the baby brother, the man who was always trying to meet everyone else's high expectations.

“No one doubts that you are working harder than anyone else to win,” I said.

Joanna chimed in, too, illustrating the compassion and strength that made us increasingly grateful that she was on board. “And we're in this with eyes wide open,” she said. “Every last one of us knows how hard this race is going to be, Sherrod. We know it, but we're believers. You're the one who always says, ‘It's not about me. It's not about any one of us. It's about the people of Ohio, and what they deserve.'”