. . . And His Lovely Wife

by Connie Schultz

  “John Ryan believes in you,” I said.

  “John Ryan believes in the work,” Sherrod said.

  “You can trust him.”

  Sherrod nodded. “Nobody works harder than John Ryan.”

  Sherrod walked upstairs to his office and made the call. He came downstairs, his face clouded.

  “He’s thinking about it,” he said. “He’s not sure he’s up to it.”

  The following account of my subsequent and immediate call to John Ryan comes from him. I swear I don’t remember this conversation, but I’m just as certain that John Ryan would never lie. Besides, it sounds like the act of a desperate wife.

  According to John Ryan, I picked up the phone and dialed his cell number.

  “John Ryan?”

  “Hey, Connie. Hi.”

  “I know Sherrod just called you, and I know what he wants you to do.”

  “Okay. Well, I’m going to give it a lot of thought—”

  “Look, John Ryan. If this is about your family, then I understand why you can’t do this. But otherwise, I don’t want to hear it. We need you.”

  And then John Ryan says I hung up on him.

  John Ryan called the next day and said his wife, Jeanne, said he should do it.

  For the rest of the campaign, when anyone asked John Ryan why he took the job, he said, “Catholic guilt and Connie Schultz’s call.”

  In keeping with the theme of our campaign, almost everyone told us we were nuts: No labor guy from Cleveland could possibly run a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.

  That’s what they said.

  We are happy to report that they were wrong.

  AFTER THE PLAIN DEALER’S COVERAGE OF THE PLAGIARISM INCIDENT, I distanced myself from any and all at the paper who would be covering Sherrod’s race. That included the entire editorial board and all the politics writers. In a couple of instances, this meant altering relationships with those I considered friends. It just seemed better for them, and for me, if we avoided talking altogether. I had gone from being a colleague to a potential source in the time it took Sherrod to say “I’m in.”

  At the end of January, The Plain Dealer launched its new political website, which included a blog called Openers, designed to make our coverage more immediate. Gone were the days when newspapers could keep a loyal readership simply by publishing a morning newspaper. The Internet, with its breaking-news immediacy, had changed that landscape, and newspapers were slowly learning how to compete.

  Local political bloggers groused that The Plain Dealer’s chief motive was to neutralize their relevance, but that presumed The Plain Dealer had been paying much attention to them in the first place. At that point, they were gnats on the screen door. Later, some area bloggers, such as Jeff Coryell of Ohio 2006 and Chris Baker of Ohio 2nd, would distinguish themselves as astute, sometimes newsbreaking, observers on Ohio’s political scene. Others would write themselves into irrelevance.

  Openers was actually a part of Doug Clifton’s strategy for The Plain Dealer to dominate the mainstream media’s coverage of Ohio’s statewide elections. We knew from the 2004 election that our statewide races, particularly those for governor and the Senate, would be fodder for political writers around the country. Clifton was determined that no one would beat us in our own backyard.

  As for the bloggers, the only thing Clifton seemed to care about was the vitriol they unloaded with predictable regularity on The Plain Dealer. Publicly, he said he didn’t care about bloggers, but I was having a hard time believing that in light of his column about my marriage to Sherrod, which cited a passage from an anonymous blogger as his reason for writing it in the first place.

  The Plain Dealer’s blog allowed Plain Dealer political writers to file dispatches from the road throughout the day, encouraging political junkies to visit the newspaper’s website regularly. It also provided a forum for audiotaped interviews with candidates. Paul Hackett’s interview with the editorial board, which was rescheduled after he canceled the first time, was taped and then posted on Openers.

  Immediately, Sherrod’s campaign staff protested because, several weeks earlier, Sherrod had initiated a meeting with the Plain Dealer editorial board to discuss what he considered to be their unfair coverage of the campaign. An audiotape of that spirited discussion, though, had not been posted on the website.

  Despite the suspicions of the campaign staff, this oversight was not, as it turned out, evidence of malice or a conspiracy against Sherrod. When a staffer called Openers editor Jean Dubail to ask why, his answer was simple: No one had taped Sherrod’s interview because it was not yet common practice. I knew Jean well, as both a respected colleague and a friend. I didn’t for a moment doubt his word.

  Nevertheless, Hackett’s audio did give him a leg up on coverage, which rankled some of Sherrod’s staff. Privately, I worried that we were becoming hypersensitive to every hiccup in the press.

  Much more disconcerting to me personally was The Plain Dealer’s decision to link to local political blogs on Openers. One of the links on the site was ardently pro-Hackett and regularly bashed Sherrod and me, at one point running a post referring to my “tits” in response to a lighthearted column I’d written about blogs. Another blogger predicted that DeWine supporters would “dismantle Connie and leave pieces of her bleeding at the roadside.”

  In early February, I sat at my desk in the newsroom and let sink in what was unfolding. With one click, Plain Dealer readers could devour whatever lies, mischaracterizations, and attacks bloggers felt like writing about us on any given day.

  I understood that no newspaper covering Ohio politics could ignore the blogs. I also understood it was time for me to leave.

  I talked to Karen Sandstrom, my longtime friend who had become my supervisor at the paper the previous year. She was sick over some of the blogs, but, like me, felt that The Plain Dealer couldn’t ignore them. She was sympathetic, but she also knew that I had already been struggling mightily over what I could and, increasingly, could not write about in my column.

  “I wrote about pantyhose,” I said, wincing at the recent memory.

  She smiled. “It was very funny.”

  “I can’t do funny all the time,” I said. “I can’t stop writing about all the things that really matter.”

  “No one said you had to,” she said, but she started nodding her head as soon as I began rattling off the list.

  The war in Iraq was a cornerstone of Sherrod’s campaign.

  Overworked pharmacists were trying to help senior citizens make sense of the new, impossibly complicated Medicare prescription drug plan. Great column, but Sherrod was holding news conferences in pharmacies around the state blasting the Republicans for passing legislation that was driven by the drug companies.

  Voter registration, which I had championed in a series of columns in 2004, was off-limits, even as Republican secretary of state Ken Blackwell, now a candidate for governor, tried to push for more restrictions. His Democratic opponent, Congressman Ted Strickland, was Sherrod’s close friend.

  “Yeah,” Karen said, nodding her head. “Doug would never let you write about that now.”

  I stared at her for a moment, then silently nodded. We both knew what was happening. The Plain Dealer’s website wasn’t the reason I had to leave. It was just the final push I had known was coming: The website had forced me to lift the shade from the window to see how the landscape had changed. I could not be the columnist I wanted to be as long as Sherrod was running for the Senate. Slowly, but ever so surely, I was losing my voice. I could not give readers the column of substance they deserved, and I wasn’t the journalist I wanted to be.

  Before I went to see Clifton, I stopped by the desk of my editor, Stuart Warner. He had warned me that this day would come, but he had also urged me to think about what Sherrod’s race could mean for the state and the country. Stuart and I had had many long talks about the importance of this race, and how Sherrod would need me with him on the road.

  “
You’re going to be his secret weapon,” Stuart had said more than once. “You’ll do more good on the road than you can ever accomplish here.” He never said it without scowling, though, because he knew how much I loved my job, and working with him. He was my editor, my mentor, and my friend.

  “You’ll never stop being a journalist,” he had written in an e-mail to my home the previous week. “It’s in your blood.”

  He looked at me now and didn’t even try to smile. He knew what was coming. “I know this is hard for you, but it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “We’re going to be covering the race more, and Sherrod is going to need you.”

  That night, Sherrod greeted the news with shock—and anger. Not at me, but at my profession. He was forever insisting that no one could possibly question my ethics or credibility, and I knew he meant that, but I also knew he was struggling with considerable guilt over the impact his decision to run was having on my life.

  “There’s no way you should have to stop writing about what matters to you,” he said. “This is bullshit.”

  “It’s not,” I said, “and you know it’s not. I have to avoid even the appearance of conflict, and that list of topics is growing too long.”

  He looked stricken, and I felt defeated. We had both known it would come to this, but his love for me and his faith in my integrity had never let him consider it a real possibility. His refusal to accept this inevitability had led to more than one argument, always unresolved.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to think this could ever happen to you.”

  The next day, on February 10, I met with Clifton to tell him I would write for the following week and then take a leave of absence for the rest of the campaign. To my surprise, he said he hadn’t expected me to leave so soon. Like my supervisors, he grimaced when I told him what some of the bloggers were saying, and he nodded when I told him I wasn’t having any fun anymore writing my column.

  “You’ll come back, right?” he said, after agreeing that I would write an exit column. “You have to say in that column that you’ll be back in November.”

  Sherrod had left for Washington that morning. After speaking to Clifton, I went home that afternoon and didn’t leave the house for the next two days. I needed to sit with my decision and think about what it would mean.

  Then, the following Monday night, the campaign received stunning news. John Ryan and press secretary Joanna Kuebler were wrapping up a meeting at our home when an Elyria Chronicle Telegram reporter called to ask Sherrod one question: “Is it true that Paul Hackett has dropped out of the race?”

  Sherrod had heard no such thing, and told him so.

  Moments later, Joanna’s cell phone rang. A campaign staffer read a breaking news story on The New York Times’s website: Two days before the primary filing deadline, Hackett was out. He was angry, too, claiming that Senators Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid had pressured him to get out of the race. He was done with politics, he told New York Times reporter Ian Urbina.

  The Plain Dealer soon reported that Hackett’s own pollster said that Sherrod was ahead by an almost 2-to-1 margin. With those kinds of numbers, Hackett couldn’t possibly raise the money he needed to wage a primary race. And without Hackett, the Democratic field was clear for Sherrod. There would be no primary.

  Sherrod greeted Hackett’s news with relief.

  “Well,” he said, “at least Hackett’s behind us now.”

  He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  STUART WARNER CALLED ME EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING.

  “Would you reconsider your leave of absence? The coverage will die down for a while now that there’s no primary.”

  Karen Sandstrom also asked me to stay longer. “Doesn’t this change things?”

  For a whole twenty-four hours, I thought maybe they were right. Maybe I could continue to write a column for a while.

  Then one of my oldest friends at the paper, editorial writer Joe Frolik, wrote a blistering attack on Sherrod—without identifying himself as a longtime family friend. Our families had celebrated many birthdays and holidays together. His take on the race was a two-fisted thrashing of Sherrod, a litany of my husband’s flaws through Joe’s eyes.

  I had no idea it was coming until I woke up that morning and turned to our op-ed page. The lengthy column, wrapped around a large photo of Sherrod and his friend Congressman Ted Strickland, was titled, “Brown Has a Little Time to Get Back on His Game.”

  When I arrived at the newsroom, several colleagues and a couple of editors mentioned the column to me. All of them said they were surprised by the vitriol, and they raised the same question ricocheting in my own head: Why wasn’t that writer held to the same standard of full disclosure as I? Why didn’t he reveal his family’s long-term friendship with the candidate’s wife?

  When I read Joe’s column now, all these months later, it doesn’t ignite the rage I felt at the time. He is a smart and gifted writer, and I wish him well. But his column still stings. I had tried to step as carefully as possible in the newsroom after Sherrod announced his candidacy. I had stopped attending newsroom meetings about political coverage, to avoid even the appearance of scouting for the campaign. I knew that Sherrod’s race would be scrutinized at every turn, which is what good journalists do—and I worked with some of the best. But I could not accept that after more than twenty years of friendship, there was no warning that my friend’s column was coming. And if I could not accept that, it was time for me to go.

  I told Stuart and Karen Sandstrom that my decision was final: The next day’s column would be my last. Even friends in the newsroom who had argued earlier in the week that I should stay until the summer now agreed there was no way I could.

  Stuart asked to speak to me privately. I thought he was going to lobby me to change my mind, but he was doing what he has always done for me in the newsroom. He was looking out for me one last time.

  “If you don’t remember anything else I’ve told you in the last four years we’ve worked together, I want you to remember this,” he said. “The media are not your friends anymore. The people here are not your friends. They are journalists covering your husband’s race, and your history with them does not matter.”

  I hated that he said that, and I hated that he was right. I felt as if I were losing an entire community of friends.

  The day before my last column ran, The Plain Dealer’s reader representative, Ted Diadiun, announced my impending departure in the “Daynote,” a daily in-house e-mail to the newsroom:

  A FOND (AND TEMPORARY) FAREWELL:

  As you will read in her column tomorrow, Connie Schultz will be on sabbatical through the end of the political campaign in order to avoid the inevitable charges of conflict of interest while her husband, Sherrod Brown, campaigns for the U.S. Senate. The energy she brings to both the newsroom and the pages of The Plain Dealer will be sorely missed.

  This might be a waste of typing energy, but it would sure be nice if our readers could learn this news from Connie before somebody sends it to Romenesko and the blogosphere. That said, in the office pool for how long it will take for the news to get out there, “Daynote” claims 30 minutes after this posting.

  Ted was off by twenty minutes. Ten minutes after he hit the send button, Jim Romenesko, who edits one of the most popular journalism blogs in the country on the Poynter Institute’s website, called my direct line at The Plain Dealer. “I wanted to beat the thirty-minute deadline,” he said, chuckling. “On principle, you know.”

  My column was posted that evening on the Plain Dealer’s website and ran in the next day’s paper, on February 16. I wrote it in less than an hour, probably because I’d had plenty of time to think about what I wanted to say. I didn’t want anyone to think I had been forced to leave. It mattered to me as a journalist, and as a feminist, that this was my decision, my timing. I also didn’t want a lot of women readers blaming Sherrod. I laid out my reasoning—and my life—as clearly as I could, hoping that no one would read
imaginary motives between the lines. I wrote about how much I loved my job, then laid out the conflict:

  I still want to write about what’s on my mind, but that is becoming increasingly difficult. Each passing week brings more limitations in my choice of topics because there is a concern that some will accuse me of using my column to stump for my husband.

  As a woman and a feminist, the suggestion that I am merely parroting my husband both amuses and offends me.

  As a journalist, however, I am sensitive to even the appearance of conflict. I am also keenly aware of the difficulties my remaining in this job could create for my colleagues, some of whom are dear friends, who must cover the Senate race.

  As a wife, I feel the pull to be the partner my husband deserves. Sherrod has been incredibly supportive of my career at every turn. Not once has he ever asked me not to write about an issue, even when he knew it might create problems with some of his constituents.

  I want to be just as unequivocally by his side now. I cannot play a significant role in his campaign as long as I work at this newspaper.

  Now comes the hard part.

  What may not feel great for me is better for everyone around me. So, this column is my last for a while. I’m taking a leave for the duration of the campaign.

  I assured readers that this was my decision, and that I planned to return to the paper after the election. I ended by reminding them of some of the people who had driven my work as a columnist:

  In the meantime, please remember to ask who gets the money in the tip jar at the coat check and at the bar.

  Tip restaurant servers in cash whenever you can.

  And if you or someone you love is thinking of settling down with another human being, keep in mind what my mother always told us girls: