“Gracie,” I yelled, “those two men in suits are trying to steal our trash!” I ran to the front door and threw it open.
Even with Gracie’s considerable disabilities, she could grasp the seriousness of the situation, probably because I started screaming, and I’ve been told, sometimes not so nicely, that I have a voice that carries.
“Hey! Hey! Drop that trash! Drop that trash!”
On cue, Gracie started barking so hard only one of her paws was touching the ground. That got their attention. The men in suits took one look at me and the beast, dropped the bags, ran to the white van, and tore off.
“You’re kidding,” Sherrod said when I finally reached him after calling his cell phone, his BlackBerry, his desk phone, and his scheduler.
“Do I sound like I’m kidding?”
“Oh, my God.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get their license?”
“What?”
“Their license plate number? Did you get it?”
I wanted to say, “Oh, sure, I whipped out the binoculars we don’t own, focused the infrared ray we also don’t have, and nailed the suckers.”
Instead, I started to cry.
“Who would do this to us?” I blubbered. “Who would care about our trash?”
Sherrod hesitated, then sighed.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “Welcome to the campaign.”
I WAS THE LAST PERSON WHO WANTED SHERROD TO RUN FOR THE Senate.
No kidding. Dead last.
Sometimes, when I was in Washington, I felt the need to explain that I am not the kind of political wife whose life revolves around her husband’s career, and usually the person on the receiving end of this information would look at me as if I’d just admitted I needed the Fork of Shame in a restaurant where everyone else was using chopsticks. This was when Sherrod was a congressman. When you are a woman married to an elected official in Washington you are always, first and foremost, a political wife, and you are expected to toe the company line in a town where the commerce is power and politics. In such a world, the standard public version of the political wife is sleek, silent, and supportive, as seen and unheard as a Victorian child.
So I had a problem. My voice carries, remember? I’ve also spent all of my adult life as a feminist and a journalist, most recently as a newspaper columnist, sounding off, speaking my mind, giving my opinions without waiting to be asked. I had been getting all kinds of rewards for drawing attention to myself: a salary, health care benefits, my own mug shot at the top of the page twice a week. The thing is, if I can’t get others to notice me, they’ll never pay attention to what and who I care about, like hourly workers’ right to a living wage, innocent men holed up in prison, a law that requires every man to own at least one denim shirt. Okay, I made up that last one, but I can dream can’t I?
I don’t mean to suggest that a woman who is a feminist and a columnist accustomed to lugging around her own megaphone can’t fall in love with a congressman, and even marry him. In fact, I’m living proof that this is exactly what she can do, although an awful lot of people like to point out that we’re not your typical combo platter. They don’t mean to suggest we’re special. Most think we’re odd, if not overly optimistic. In any case, I’m a wife paid to give her opinion, so I’m your basic nightmare as a political wife, not to mention for any political consultant.
Not for Sherrod, though, which is one of the reasons I married him. He happens to love my opinions—most of them, anyway—and we tend to agree on most things, too. He is forever pushing me to speak my mind. He also shamelessly gushes on my behalf. Even total strangers tell me how proud he is of me. They know this because he often manages to work me into speeches about job-killing trade agreements and the doughnut hole in Medicare Part D. Now, that’s love.
When we married in April 2004, I knew that I was marrying a member of Congress, but I didn’t feel as if I was marrying a congressman. I fell in love with Sherrod, a smart, passionate, funny guy who claimed within weeks of meeting this longtime single mother that he knew he’d found the love of his life. The feeling was mutual, much to the shock of everyone I knew—especially me.
Like many women, I’d lived numerous lives by the time I met Sherrod. For eleven years I was a married, stay-at-home mom who wrote freelance stories at my kitchen table. Then, in the time it took me to say “But I want a career, too,” I became a single working mother, and I’d been doing that for another eleven years when Sherrod showed up. By then, I had figured out it was best to pave your own road to happiness, and mine took me to a place where, for the most part, I was fairly content.
I did have the occasional pang of loneliness. I recall a time when my daughter, Caitlin, who was nine at the time, couldn’t sleep. She asked if she could climb in with me. Now that she’s twenty and I’m lucky if she’ll even make time for lunch with me, I’m so glad I never said no when she believed just lying next to me would solve all her problems. She snuggled into bed with me that night, bringing our dog and two black cats with her, and was sound asleep in the time it took her to tell me she loved me. A long time later, I was still awake, lying flat on my back and thinking, “There are five beating hearts in this bed, and not one of them is a man’s.”
My dear friend Bill Lubinger once asked me, “Is it hardest to be alone when you have bad news?”
“No,” I said, “it’s harder when you’ve got good news.”
Overall, though, life was hectic but rich. My son, Andy, was already grown and pursuing love and his doctorate degree at The Ohio State University. (If I don’t include “The” in the university’s name, we’ll be noting my mistake in the paperback edition of this book. The things academia obsesses over.) I took care of my daughter, tended my friends, and held my mother’s hand as she took her last breaths. From that moment on, I also tried to be a good daughter to my grieving father, a retired factory worker who had always hated his job and most of his life and now he was mad at God, too, for taking Mom away so soon.
“Why does she have to go?” he asked me outside her hospital room two days before she died. “It was supposed to be me.”
How do you answer a question like that? For five years and running since then, I’d been trying.
So, by the time Sherrod sent me his first e-mail asking where in the world The Plain Dealer had found me, I’d done plenty of living and was glad of the adventure. For the record, I’d never laid eyes on Sherrod before, but I had read his book, Congress from the Inside. I had never shaken his hand or interviewed him or included so much as a paraphrased quote from him in any story I wrote. If I had, I wouldn’t have gone out with him. Some stories you’re glad you missed, which I didn’t know until I was forty-five and slid into the restaurant booth opposite Sherrod Brown on January 1, 2003.
He showed up wearing four days’ growth of facial hair because he was afraid of looking too eager. He also wore a sweatshirt from Lorain Community College. He didn’t even own a shirt from his alma mater, Yale, which he told me almost immediately and which earned him big points. He also brought two pages of his favorite quotes. He had typed them himself and then folded the pages into the back pocket of his jeans, which had holes in the knees.
I was in love by the time we ordered coffee. Sherrod, ever competitive, swears he knew I was the one as soon as I arrived, after I dropped my coat and then nearly head-butted him when we both bent over to pick it up.
We were engaged by Thanksgiving. We married on my mother’s birthday the following spring. Our children—Caitlin and Andy, and Sherrod’s daughters, Emily and Elizabeth—walked us down the aisle at Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ in Cleveland. Sherrod is Lutheran, so we ended up with three pastors—Pilgrim’s pastors, my friends Kate Huey and Laurie Hafner, and Sherrod’s pastor from First Lutheran Church in Lorain, Linwood (Woody) Chamberlain. At our reception, Sherrod said when a journalist marries a congressman, you need three ministers.
I had lived in a rented duplex in Shaker H
eights, on Cleveland’s east side, for eleven years, while Sherrod lived in his congressional district in Lorain on the far west side. After we married, he needed to continue living in his congressional district, but my daughter, Caitlin, was a junior in high school, and we did not want to further yank the yarn on her unraveling life by making her move and change schools. Also, most of her memories revolved around life with her single mom, and no one filled a house—or a life—quite like the irrepressible Sherrod.
“He takes some getting used to, Mom,” she said early in our courtship. This was right around the time he decided that our precious pug, Gracie, had a name that didn’t match her face, so he renamed her Rufus. To Caitlin’s horror, Gracie immediately took to the new moniker.
“Your name is Gracie,” Cait would tell her beloved pug. “Gracie.” The dog would wag, wag, wag her tail—until Sherrod called “Rufus!” Then off she’d go to her new best friend.
Cait was growing increasingly fond of Sherrod, though, which I first discovered while we were watching C-SPAN one evening, waiting for Sherrod to give a speech on the floor of Congress. The coolest people turn into C-SPAN nerds once they’re related to a member of Congress. You also find yourself referring to people you can’t stand as “my friend across the aisle.” Strangest thing.
As soon as Sherrod popped up on the screen, Caitlin turned to me and said, “You know, Mom, I do care about Sherrod.”
I know thin ice when I’m sliding on it, so I just tiptoed. “That’s nice, honey,” I said. “I’m glad.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding her head as she stared at the screen. “If he died? I’d cry.”
SO, FOR A YEAR AND A HALF, WE KEPT TWO HOUSEHOLDS GOING, which meant we were forever leaving something on the other side of town. When Cait graduated from high school in June 2005, we merged. By the end of that summer, we had moved together into a development, chosen because it was near the airport and only a half-hour drive to my job in downtown Cleveland.
Our children’s lives were humming along. Caitlin left for college in Ohio that September, and Elizabeth returned to Columbia University, where she was a senior. Emily was married to Michael Stanley. They lived in Brooklyn, New York, both of them working at jobs they loved. Andy had brought to our wedding a remarkable young woman from Long Island named Kristina Torres. He claims that when he asked if he could bring her, I immediately asked, “Is she worth $115?”—referring to our cost per plate at the wedding reception sit-down dinner. I was simply trying, in a mother’s subtle way, to establish whether this was a serious relationship. They have since set a wedding date, and I like her. Definitely worth the $115.
Our children were off living their lives, and we could finally settle into our own. For the first time, I felt that I was Sherrod’s full-time wife, and that person evolved in the moments hidden from public view. Sherrod’s wife twirled the curls of his hair around her fingers in the darkened movie theater and listened to him play “Let It Be” on the piano late at night. She took long walks with him even in the rain and sat like a girlfriend on the front stoop waiting for him to pull into the drive. Sherrod’s wife had Sherrod all to herself, at least once in a while, in those private, unscheduled moments that incubate a marriage and keep it alive.
Then the earth shifted.
Suddenly, Sherrod was considering a run for the Senate.
A Democrat had not been elected statewide in Ohio for fourteen years, but the political climate was changing dramatically in our state, and the gale winds were threatening to topple the Republican Party.
Republican Bob Taft had become the first Ohio governor charged with a crime after he failed to report gifts and golf outings. He was convicted of violating Ohio ethics laws and ordered to pay $4,000 and apologize to the state. One widely publicized poll of governors’ popularity ranked him last.
Tom Noe, a Republican fundraiser and party activist in the Toledo area, oversaw the state’s rare-coin fund investment with the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. Noe made headlines across the country after the Toledo Blade exposed his role in what was soon dubbed “Coingate.” Noe was headed for conviction on charges of theft, money laundering, forgery, and corrupt activity. In a second scandal, he was charged with illegally funneling $45,400 to President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign. The Bush campaign had originally honored Noe with “Pioneer” status, but after he was indicted, many prominent politicians, including Sherrod’s potential Republican opponent, Senator Mike DeWine, scrambled to return the money Noe had raised for them, or to donate it to charity.
Finally, we had the nonstop coverage of Republican congressman Bob Ney. He represented the 18th District in southern Ohio until he decided not to, which came after he pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and making false statements related to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
So much Republican scandal, coupled with Americans’ growing opposition to Bush’s war in Iraq, made even the most reticent of Democrats on the state and national scene start talking about perfect storm this and sea change that—often casting a hopeful eye in Sherrod’s direction.
At first, some Ohio Democratic Party officials tried to persuade Sherrod to run for governor. It was a proposition loaded with history, both political and personal.
In 2001, Sherrod considered running for governor against Bob Taft after the Republican majority threatened to take away Sherrod’s congressional district. Sherrod’s only electoral loss up to then had been to Taft in Sherrod’s 1990 bid for reelection as secretary of state, but this time it was Taft who looked vulnerable. Sherrod had barely whispered his possible candidacy for governor before the Republicans folded on the redistricting scheme, drawing an even safer district for Sherrod in the end. Journalists felt robbed of a feisty rematch and branded Sherrod as a guy who always leans but never runs.
If Sherrod ran for governor, I would essentially have to run for Ohio’s First Lady, the mere suggestion of which provoked rounds of hysterical laughter among friends who claimed to love me. After several glasses of wine one evening we all agreed that the best way for Sherrod to have a successful run for governor would be to ship me off to Europe for six months. First Ladyhood and I just weren’t a good fit. Poor Sherrod. I still remember his look of utter horror when, in a state of heightened anxiety brought on by three successive calls to our house in one night urging him to run, I screamed, “Okay, but if you win, I’m never going to give any gift shaped like the state of Ohio!” An understandable outburst, I think, when you consider we have a basement full of baskets, pie tins, Christmas ornaments, clocks—you name, we got it—all given to Sherrod by elected officials and shaped to resemble the great state of Ohio.
Fortunately, Sherrod didn’t want to be governor. He loved the stuff of national politics, and eventually a good friend and Democratic colleague, Congressman Ted Strickland, announced in 2005 that he would run for governor. His wife, Frances, was the perfect candidate for First Lady, too. She had a doctorate in education, was the embodiment of grace, and wrote political songs that she sang while playing her guitar all over the state of Ohio. Sherrod’s staff eventually started suggesting that maybe I should come up with some kind of talent—someone proposed that I learn how to play spoons—but I was destined to be a far less entertaining candidate’s spouse.
Sherrod made it clear from the beginning that even if he decided he did want to run for the Senate, he would not do it without my unequivocal support.
“I won’t do this unless you want me to,” he said over and over. “And I don’t mean you finally shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Oh, all right, go ahead.’ That’s not good enough. You have to want me to run, because I’m not going to do this without you.”
For a long while, he was not sure he wanted to risk giving up the job he loved for one that was far from certain to be his no matter how hard he campaigned. And, truth be told, aside from his family, there was not an endless string of people begging Sherrod to get in. No matter how many politicians announce their races with angst-ridden assur
ances that they are only surrendering to the will of the people, they are usually giving in only to the relentless call of their own ambition. That isn’t as bad as it sounds. Often, it’s an ambition to do good in the world, but even then you have to be mighty driven and fairly full of your own potential to believe that, out of millions of options, you are the one who should lead.
Most local people who liked and respected Sherrod, including party activists and the overwhelming majority of his constituents, wanted Sherrod to stay put. He was a seven-term Democratic congressman, a true progressive in a seat that even Republicans begrudgingly conceded was his until he didn’t want it anymore. If the Democrats took the House in the 2006 midterm elections, he would chair the powerful Health Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Finally, he would have the chance to overhaul a health care system that benefited insurance and drug companies at the expense of the health of too many Americans.
For years, Sherrod had organized bus trips to Canada for senior citizens so they could buy affordable prescription drugs. He had refused the congressional health care plan, vowing never to take it until all Americans had health care. Noble gestures, but they didn’t do anything to get to the heart of America’s health care crisis. For Sherrod, the chairmanship would finally give the tiger some teeth.
He couldn’t have it both ways, either. He had to choose. To run for the Senate, Sherrod would have to surrender his seat in Congress and take on a two-term Republican senator in a state that had twice delivered victory to George W. Bush, most recently in 2004, when I watched my husband slump behind the wheel of our parked car on Election Night and hold his head in his hands as one phone call after another assured him that early reports of exit polls had been wrong, wrong, wrong and we were about to give Democrats across the country a reason to hate Ohio all over again.
. . . And His Lovely Wife Page 2