Clifton said Sloat told him he had no idea Sherrod and I were married, and that our marriage was going to complicate the life of every Plain Dealer reporter covering Sherrod’s race.
“Will each reporter on the political beat eventually end up having to explain that what Connie does on her own time is her own business (as it is, of course)?” wrote Sloat. “Is it time for The Plain Dealer to explain that publicly, and up-front, now that the campaign has started?”
“Does he not read the paper he writes for?” I asked Clifton, who had called me into his office. I found it curious that Sloat had told Clifton he didn’t even know Sherrod and I were married. The Plain Dealer had mentioned our marriage in several stories. In November 2005, I had devoted an entire column to our engagement after Clifton insisted that our society writer, Sarah Crump, cover it in her column.
Clifton shrugged his shoulders. “I think he raised important issues and I should write about them. We have to make sure readers know that we’re aware of potential conflicts and that you and I agree on the boundaries.”
Clifton’s column, titled “Happy Couple Raise Issues in Newsroom,” ran on The Plain Dealer’s op-ed page on Thursday, December 8, 2005. Doug showed it to me first, which I appreciated, and he didn’t throw me out of his office when I said, yet again, that I thought an entire column about my marriage was overreacting.
Clifton outlined the potential conflicts, for me and for the paper. He mentioned Sherrod’s primary race against “a promising young Democrat” named Paul Hackett. The “Brown-Schultz marriage will go from—for us—a sometimes ouchy, low-visibility one to one that is likely to become increasingly painful.”
After several paragraphs about the unfortunate position I’d put him in, Clifton ended by assuring readers we all knew how to do our jobs:
I have neither the ability to influence Sherrod Brown’s conduct, nor the intent. But I do have influence over Connie and, happily, we’re on the same page.
She has a keen understanding of the delicate position she—and our paper—are in. She understands that she can’t both campaign for her husband and write a column. And I understand that she is a supportive spouse who will be at her candidate husband’s side from time to time.
If there comes a time when Connie feels her obligations as the wife of a candidate require a more visible presence on the campaign, she will take a leave of absence. Meanwhile, look for Connie in her twice-weekly column, not campaigning for Sherrod Brown.
And understand that Connie’s relationship with candidate Brown will have no influence—for or against—our coverage of his campaign.
Clifton’s column got wide coverage in media circles, and I received many supportive e-mails from journalists—mostly women—from around the country. The basic theme of the letters: Don’t you give up your career.
Once Clifton’s column appeared, I never stopped having to answer the insult wrapped in a question, universally posed only by men: Can Connie Schultz write her own opinions when she’s married to Sherrod Brown? I know he didn’t intend for that to happen, and I don’t hold it against Clifton. But it did make me cranky for a long, long time.
FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, I REMAINED IN THE BACKGROUND AT public events, but I was increasingly involved behind the scenes in the campaign. I took on so many additional responsibilities while trying to maintain a full-time schedule of column writing—not to mention navigating the increasingly rocky terrain of permissible topics—that the pace started to take a toll on both my nerves and my energy.
I was straddling two worlds, not taking up residence in either of them, and feeling lost much of the time. When I look back on it, I can see that what I most feared was that the Connie I knew—the writer I had known for years—was evaporating. I looked at the long road ahead and thought, Wow, I could lose the marriage I cherish, the career I love, and the me I know, by the time this campaign is over. It seemed like a lot to lose.
Gone were our late-night talks about everything, big and small, that had filled our days. No more walk-and-talks around the neighborhood, no end-of-the-week surprises when Sherrod would burst through the door shouting “I caught an early plane!” Most nights now, when he wasn’t in session in Washington, he didn’t drag through the door until almost midnight, if at all. Ohio is a big state, and often he stayed in a hotel so he wouldn’t have to get up before five to get to the next day’s first event. He wanted to be home every night, but doing so would wear him out long before the May primary took place.
Our entire life together had shifted. Now every conversation, no matter where it started, ended up being about the campaign. It was all politics, all the time, and it takes extraordinary discipline to maintain that level of focus without feeling that you’ve lost sight of everything else that matters in life. Every day, we told ourselves this race could help change the direction of the country. Most days, that was enough.
Instead of charging ahead to sort out all that was happening, I chipped away at myself, refusing to even admit how scared I was. My range of column topics got more and more narrow for fear of looking as if I were using my newspaper column to stump for my husband. My conversations with colleagues became fewer and narrower, too, because I had morphed from a colleague to a source. I didn’t want to put them in a position of learning something through friendship that they knew they should put to use as journalists.
I also surrendered our social life to a scheduler, who was now planning our every night and weekend. Sometimes that was the hardest part of my life to give up, and I didn’t always deal with it well. One incident in particular comes to mind.
It probably didn’t help that I first learned about it after spending a grueling weekend folded in the backseat of the campaign car. Add to that a full day camped out at University Hospitals for my father’s surgery on one of his two blocked carotid arteries. Even if I had spent the previous three days curled up in bed with a week’s supply of Dom Perignon and Bugles—my idea of comfort food—I doubt I would have been a good sport about this one: The campaign had scheduled an out-of-town fundraiser on our second wedding anniversary.
I seldom asked for personal time with Sherrod. This was an exception, and one I didn’t think needed much explaining beyond my saying, “Please keep this date open.” I realize this may mark me a sappy romantic, but I think a middle-aged couple ought to celebrate the day they thumbed their noses at the failure rates of second marriages and declared their devotion for as long as they both shall live. Considering that we were forty-six and fifty-one at the time, we figured the odds were in our favor on that one.
As happens so often in campaigns, this snafu was somebody else’s fault. The scheduler blamed the fundraiser and the fundraiser blamed the scheduler, and behind my back they both blamed me for being impossible to deal with.
What bothered me most was my reaction to this depressing news: Instead of feeling blue because my husband would be away on our special day, my mind immediately rocketed to the possible press coverage. What if a reporter found out that the Senate candidate who was supposed to be so in love with his bride blew off their anniversary to raise money? So what, some would say. But you never knew what could become a snarky item in a metro brief or on a newspaper’s blog.
I imagined the press call: “You say you’re running a values-driven campaign, Congressman, but you’re dumping your wife on your anniversary? What kind of family values are those?”
“Is this why you kept your own name, Ms. Schultz?…Ms. Schultz?”
Two days later, I discovered that Sherrod was also scheduled to be in New York on April 19, the night we were to celebrate the publication of my first book. Random House was publishing a collection of my columns, Life Happens, and I had asked them to launch the book tour at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cleveland, out of loyalty to the town I called home. Hundreds of people were expected to attend —in Cleveland, which is in Ohio, which is where he is running for senator, I emphasized to the campaign scheduler and fundraiser, who were too busy blaming
each other again to listen to the not-so-lovely wife, who was just impossible to deal with anyway.
When I told Sherrod, he shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know how this happened,” he said.
The following week, I went to a private lunch before a “Women of Excellence” panel discussion with three prominent Cleveland women. One of the panelists turned to me and asked, “How does a marriage survive a Senate race?”
Still stinging from the botched wedding anniversary, I wanted to say, “I’ll let you know.”
Bad idea. So not the political-wife thing to do.
So, instead, I tried to sound as if I had it all figured out. “It’s important for a couple to be cognizant of the pressures and mindful of the need to recalibrate when things get out of hand,” I said as they all nodded.
Oh, hell, I thought. Even I don’t believe me.
“Actually, I want to bounce something off you,” I said to the three women I had just met. They leaned in, and I told them about the scheduling problems.
“That has to change,” one of them said.
“You have to set the ground rules right now,” another said. “No one screws with the wife.”
“Yeah?” I said, quickly warming to my new sistahs.
“Yeah,” they all said, nodding their heads and waving their forks in the air.
“Yeah,” I said, waving my own fork now. I made a mental note to call Sherrod as soon as I was back in the car.
By the time I pulled out of the parking lot, though, Sherrod was calling me.
“I changed the schedule,” he said, sounding as if he’d just won a seven-way primary. “I told them no to both, baby. We’re going out to dinner for our anniversary, and I’m going to be front and center at your book signing. You won’t be able to miss me: I’ll be the tired guy trying not to cry at the sight of you.”
FOR NEARLY FOUR MONTHS, I TOLD MYSELF THAT NO SENATE RACE, not even my husband’s, was going to interfere with my column, which ran twice a week. It felt like the only thing left of my previous life, and I clung to it. My usual practice was to write first drafts by 11 A.M., then e-mail them to my editor and my computer at work. I’d drive the thirty minutes to the newsroom in downtown Cleveland for the final edit. Most other days I was either out interviewing or working the phone in the newsroom.
That schedule worked fine before I was sitting in on one early-morning conference call after another for the campaign during the week and then spending entire weekends on the road with Sherrod. Twice in early February, I drove into the Plain Dealer parking garage, turned off the car, and promptly fell asleep. It gets mighty cold during Cleveland winters, and I could count on shivering myself awake within a half-hour or so. I also started dozing behind the wheel in shopping centers a lot after work. I tried telling myself there was nothing at all unusual about falling asleep in various parking lots around northeast Ohio, but one conversation with a close friend, Dr. Gaylee McCracken, cured me of that little bit of magical thinking.
Gaylee has known me for nearly thirty years, and she is a woman used to being in charge. When I was about to separate from my first husband, she walked through my house with a pad of stickers to mark everything she thought I should take with me. When she found out I was dating Sherrod, she Googled him and gave me a full report.
She married young, was one of Cleveland’s top-tier civic volunteers while raising two children, and was also a talented silkscreen artist. Her giant prints of seashores and flowers—many with images of human genitalia tucked into waves and petals—hang throughout my home.
Soon after Gaylee turned forty, she started feeling her life was missing something. Most women I know respond to such needling midlife urges by joining book clubs or learning sign language. Gaylee went to medical school. Eight years later, she was a full-time internist who fired patients if they didn’t stop smoking after a year and during her annual reviews was always reprimanded for taking too long with her patients, who adored her.
I was not her patient, as I decided long ago that I didn’t want a friend trying to make small talk while she had my legs up in stirrups. However, I’d been going to my own doctor, Patricia Kellner, for so long that she’d become my friend, too, so Gaylee wasn’t exactly dissuaded from taking a medical interest in my comings and goings. She knew I’d had chronic asthma since I was sixteen, and starting about thirty seconds after Sherrod declared his race for the Senate, she regularly checked in to make sure I was taking care of myself. For a while, I lied to her with impunity, assuring her that I was keeping up with exercise (so not) and vitamins (not a one) and getting plenty of sleep (not even close). Then one evening, right around six, her call woke me up—in the car.
“Con?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to figure out (a) whose voice was on the phone and (b) when did it start to snow? “Were you asleep?”
“Um, well, yeah. Just a little nap.”
A driver in the car next to me slammed her door and pressed that annoying little key chain button, thus prompting her horn to trumpet to the entire world that her locks were securely engaged.
“Are you in a car?”
“Um, well, yeah.”
“You’re sleeping in your car?”
“Only for a few minutes.”
“Where are you?”
I thought we’d just established that. “In my car?”
“Where in your car?”
“At Heinen’s.”
“Were you getting groceries?”
“That was the plan.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” she said. “You’re sleeping in the middle of a parking lot at six o’clock at night.”
“Actually, I’m not really in the middle, I’m more on the side, near the Home Depot.”
“This is funny?”
“Apparently not.”
From that moment on, Gaylee was on the case. Her dozens of phone messages throughout the campaign usually began, “Not that you think you actually need me, but I am wondering how you’re doing, and if you don’t call back soon I’ll assume you’re asleep in a car somewhere….”
BY JANUARY, WE WERE DESPERATE FOR SOME GOOD NEWS IN THE campaign, and it came delivered by lanky, six-foot-one John Ryan, who agreed in mid-January to become Sherrod’s campaign manager. Our campaign was a mess. We were hiring people willy-nilly, and Sherrod was still getting hammered by bloggers and some Democratic activists for opposing Hackett in the upcoming May primary. The fundraising machine was all but hibernating. We knew it, the press knew it, every Democrat we ran into knew it. John Ryan knew it, too, but it didn’t stop him from taking one of the biggest leaps of his career.
We’d had a hard time finding a campaign manager. At first, Sherrod had interviewed candidates, many of them high-profile, who were recommended by the national Democratic Party. All of them were from somewhere other than Ohio. One by one, they assured us they weren’t coming to our state any time soon. Either they couldn’t bring themselves to work in that state that had broken so many Kerry supporters’ hearts, or they simply didn’t think Sherrod could win. They never said that outright, of course, but they’d say things like, “Wow, you’ve got a tough race ahead,” or, “Whew, you’re going to need an awful lot of money to beat Karl Rove.”
To this day, we don’t know how we finally got the sense to turn to John Ryan. We’ve known him for years, and that’s what we always call him, John Ryan, two names, like John Boy from The Waltons. Can’t explain it. It’s just who he is to us.
Well, he’s that, and so much more.
For one thing, he was the devoted father of three daughters, and Sherrod often said John Ryan seemed to love his girls as much as Sherrod loved his. That mattered to Sherrod, who would throw himself across train tracks for his Emily and Elizabeth. Like Sherrod, John Ryan regularly brought his girls to political events, so they often ran into each other with daughters in tow.
Sherrod grew close to Ryan because of their mut
ual passion for workers’ rights and social justice. John Ryan was only twenty-one when he was elected president of the local union of the Communications Workers of America. In 1996, he became president of the Cleveland AFL-CIO. Ryan transformed their grassroots political operation into a well-oiled machine that backed candidates and issues that regularly won. He was an ardent, in-your-face union activist who also knew how to get along with people in the business community. Crain’s Cleveland Business named Ryan the fourth most influential Clevelander in their 2003 Top Forty listing.
One of my favorite John Ryan stories involves a discussion he had with his union activist father, Arthur, toward the end of his life. Arthur was in his mid-eighties, suffering from dementia and living in a nursing home. John Ryan regularly visited his dad late at night, after work and his many meetings, and one evening he showed up looking especially tired. He was volunteering nearly full-time for a countywide Democratic candidate, and his father asked if he was getting paid overtime.
“What’s that, Dad?”
“Overtime. You getting overtime for that?”
“No, Dad.”
“You know what you need, son?”
“What’s that, Dad?”
“You need a union.”
I knew John Ryan from my time as a reporter and a union member with the Newspaper Guild–CWA. I didn’t know a reporter who didn’t trust him, and so it was easy to build a friendship once I started dating Sherrod. I continued to like him even after he spent months trying to cajole Sherrod into running for governor.
“Guv’nor,” he’d say, whenever he ran into us.
“Mrs. Guv’nor,” he’d add, nodding at my furrowed brow and then laughing in his high-pitched giggle.
One evening, after yet another candidate for campaign manager had turned us down, Sherrod and I were sitting in our family room and John Ryan’s name came up. I don’t know why, or how, and Sherrod can’t remember either. We do, however, applaud ourselves now for our momentary flash of genius in a bumbling campaign at the time.
. . . And His Lovely Wife Page 5