“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?
IT 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 n
ever 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.
I won’t pretend your cartoon wasn’t devastating, at least to me. I’ve been one of your biggest fans. I’ve been silent about all the rest of this week’s coverage about a staffer’s mistake, even though I thought it was blown entirely out of proportion, and probably because he is married to me. But today’s cartoon, by you, was a sucker punch. I would never, ever have expected you to depict Sherrod in such an unfair and ugly way.
Just so you know, Sherrod remains a hero to so many. Especially to me.
Darcy never responded, but it made its way to editor-in-chief Doug Clifton. When I found out that Clifton had forwarded it to my department supervisor—who told me she defended me as a loyal wife—I dragged myself into Clifton’s office.
“I know I shouldn’t have sent that note to Darcy,” I said.
Clifton nodded. He looked weary, not angry.
“It’s only going to get harder here for you, Connie, and you’re going to have to keep your feelings out of this.”
“Or I’m going to have to leave,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.”
Later that evening, Joanna sent an e-mail to Sherrod that gave both of us a chance to take a deep breath and reminded us of what has always mattered most.
This is so beside anything relevant, but in light of our day, I thought I would share. I was at the store tonight and the cashier, who I know by face, chatted with me in our normal exchange of pleasantries. She saw my ID and asked where I worked. I told her I work for a Congressman from Ohio. We exchanged laments about our day and joked about finding a money tree.
I started to walk away when it occurred to me that I didn’t know her name, despite my having “chatted” with her for more than two years.
I stopped, turned around and
introduced myself. Her name is Chantale. We shook hands.
As I left the store, it honestly occurred to me that I learned that from you and Connie. And how much better the world would be if we all did that more.
I say this only because we are having a really rough time, but in the end, you guys are to the core something that is so rare, and what you both have makes a difference in the world.
I printed Joanna’s e-mail, folded it into a tight square, and tucked it into my wallet for the long months ahead.
three
“I Want You to Be Wallpaper”
THE TURMOIL FOR ME AT THE PLAIN DEALER, BOTH INSIDE MY head and in the newsroom, seemed to increase with each passing week of Sherrod’s campaign.
“I want you to be wallpaper,” said Doug Clifton.
Doug was concerned that my presence, however passive, at Sherrod’s campaign events could be interpreted as Plain Dealer support for Sherrod’s candidacy. I told Doug most people would think I was standing alongside my husband because I was his wife. Besides, for the three years I’d been writing a column, I had been the far right’s punching bag. It wasn’t as if my politics were a mystery to even the most casual reader.
Yet I could appreciate Doug’s skittishness. He was the one who would get the plaintive e-mails from readers—both inside and outside the newsroom, as it turned out—and, ultimately, the burden of me rested with him. I kept fighting this urge to apologize to him for falling in love in the first place. Instead, I assured him that I would abide by his dictate and blend into the background as best I could, even though what he suggested was quite a departure for me.
For the first four months of Sherrod’s race, I looked far less engaged in the campaign than did the political groupies who aimed their cell phone cameras at us everywhere we went. I was wallpaper.
This did not, however, stop bloggers—and occasionally a colleague—from claiming otherwise. In early December, Plain Dealer reporter Bill Sloat, who lived and worked five hours away in Cincinnati, wrote Clifton an e-mail after he saw a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer that mentioned I had attended a church service where Sherrod spoke.
. . . And His Lovely Wife Page 4