I left a message, spoke at the fundraiser, then headed for a labor event.
A half-hour later, I left another message for her. Gave another speech.
Two hours later, I called again. This time she answered.
“Hey. What’s up with not returning my calls?”
She sighed. “I returned all of them, Mom.”
“Did you leave messages?”
“Yup.”
Walter O’Malley, our driver, looked over at me and shot a sympathetic smile. “You left your phone in the car, remember? You didn’t want it to ring during your speeches.”
At that moment, there weren’t enough apologies in the world to convince my daughter that she mattered at all. I was going to have to wrestle that beast called politics on a regular basis.
An hour later, I was standing in my kitchen when my youngest sister, Toni, called.
“Hey, Con, can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“You think it’s okay that I’ve called Dad’s house a few times to hear his voice on the answering machine?”
I grabbed a chair and sat down.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Now, if you’re doing that six months from now, we’ll have to have a talk.”
“Okay.”
I was grateful that she trusted me enough to call.
MAY TURNED OUT TO BE A MONTH OF REVELATIONS FOR SHERROD and me. And in the process, he started whistling again, which I knew was a very good sign.
When you’re running for elected office, people seldom ask, “How are you?” What they always want to know is, “How’s it going?”
In the beginning of the campaign, Sherrod and I answered too honestly. We’d shake our heads and say, “This is so hard.” Sometimes, we’d list the reasons why: the endless push to raise millions of dollars, introducing yourself to entire regions of people who had never heard of you, total strangers giving you unsolicited advice on everything from how you wear your hair to what colors you choose for your bumper stickers. And then there was all that wear and tear on our middle-aged bodies as we traveled hundreds of miles a day cooped up in a car.
It didn’t take long, though, for us to realize that whenever we answered like that, their faces would fall. They weren’t really asking out of any concern for us. They were asking “How’s it going?” because they wanted reasons to be hopeful. It had been fourteen years since a Democrat had won statewide office in Ohio, and the last thing they wanted to hear was whining.
Fortunately, around the same time in May, an activist in Cincinnati named Michele Young came to a book signing and immediately adopted me as her project. We were the same age, both mothers, and where I saw the end of my identity, she saw the beginning of a whole new career.
“You need to read this new book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt,” she told me. “I’m going to send it to you. It’s all about how they gave people hope. That’s what you and Sherrod need to do, too. We need hope, Connie. Hope.”
The book, The Defining Moment, by Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, arrived at the campaign office a few days later. It focused on FDR’s first hundred days in office, and I devoured it, reading sections aloud to Sherrod late at night.
“What FDR changed most in his first one hundred days was how Americans felt about their future,” I said. “He gave them hope, and that’s what we have to do.”
After that, Sherrod and I started talking a lot about the concept of hope and how to bring it alive for the men and women of Ohio. We started by offering a very different answer to the question “How’s it going?” We knew it was important to be upbeat no matter how bad a week we were having, and this helped us focus on what was actually going right.
“It’s going better than we dared hope,” I’d tell people. They often looked a little surprised at first, then relieved, even delighted. Our job was to stoke a hope in them that we were ready for whatever came our way and embolden them for the long days ahead.
Over time, I started to think that voters don’t want you to be one of them when it comes to what you can endure. Oh, sure, they want to know you’re a lot like them when it comes to where you shop for groceries and how much you love your kids, but they want to believe you have the kind of strength and courage that keeps you standing in the middle of a hurricane. We saw that question in their eyes every time they warned us about a Republican “October surprise,” spun worst-case scenarios about voter fraud, or conjured up images of a diabolical Karl Rove who would do anything to keep Sherrod out of office. They’d lay out the threat, and then look at us as if to say, “Are you up for this?”
Our answer had to be, “You betcha.”
And every time we said it, we meant it. That’s the funny thing about focusing on what you can do rather than what isn’t happening at the moment. I don’t think it was coincidental that I started feeling better about the campaign as soon as I began reassuring others that we knew what we were doing and could handle any ugliness that came our way.
Good thing, too, because it wouldn’t be long before we’d have the chance to prove it.
twelve
If Not Now—When?
BY THE END OF MAY, SHERROD WAS GETTING NERVOUS ABOUT HIS campaign’s ad strategy. Immediately before the Ohio primary, Mike DeWine went on the air with two positive ads meant to depict him as a mild-mannered “independent” in the midst of rampant partisanship. It would be one of the few consistent themes of his campaign: Mike DeWine, unlike ardent liberal Sherrod Brown, could “get things done.” Sherrod, just as consistently, kept pointing out that Mike DeWine voted with President George W. Bush 96 percent of the time but spent most of his campaign bragging about the other 4 percent.
Most political analysts say that positive ads do little to persuade voters, but candidates who can afford to do so usually start with feel-good ads praising themselves. DeWine, who had nearly double Sherrod’s cash on hand by then, was no exception.
One of the constant pressures in such a high-stakes race is deciding when to go on the air with campaign ads. Television advertising devours more than two-thirds of fundraising dollars, and Ohio is one of the most expensive states in the country because it has so many separate television ad markets: Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Youngstown, Steubenville, Lima, and Zanesville, as well as the Wheeling and Huntington/Charleston markets in West Virginia, which reach into southern and eastern Ohio.
It was our estimated television budget that forced us to set a fundraising goal that started at $7 million, considered very low, and went as high as $17 million, which would put us in the ballpark with DeWine, or so we thought. Everything was speculation. We had no idea how much of that money, if any, would be raised or contributed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
On May 31, I had a lengthy conference call with our pollster, Diane Feldman, and two of our consultants, David Doak and Tom O’Donnell of DCO Media. John Ryan and various other staff members also joined the call. Sherrod had asked for the strategy session because DeWine had already spent nearly eight hundred thousand dollars on soft ads meant to lift his profile with Ohio voters.
We had spent nothing on TV ads so far, and, barring an attack ad from DeWine over the summer, we didn’t plan to go on the air until after Labor Day. This strategy was starting to worry Sherrod. He wanted to discuss whether we should go up earlier on TV. He wanted to define Mike DeWine before DeWine had a chance to define Sherrod Brown. Sherrod was especially concerned about southern and western Ohio, where many people had never heard of Sherrod.
Diane Feldman was just as concerned that Mike DeWine benefited most when voters didn’t know much about him, and that it was our job to get the word out about his special-interest money and his votes that betrayed the middle class.
Sherrod couldn’t join the call because of scheduled speeches, so I took notes throughout the phone call. Rereading them months later, I realized the conversation illustrated a great deal a
bout the how and why behind campaign ads. It also provided a glimpse into how we made decisions about when, and what, to air in our own campaign, and reflected a general anxiety over how much the DSCC would help Sherrod. I was noticeably silent in the following exchange because I had never been involved in a campaign, and all this back-and-forth about how and when to market my husband rendered me speechless, which is rare indeed.
Pollster Diane Feldman had worked for Sherrod for ten years, and she knew Sherrod better than any of the other consultants. Smart and direct, Feldman seldom drew attention to herself with self-promotion. We paid a lot of attention to her because she was virtually always right, and I listened with a heavy heart when she said it was up to us to define Mike DeWine, and then outlined how we should do it.
“We should be more pointed on our negative,” she said. “It helps Mike DeWine in Ohio when voters don’t know him. We need to connect him to [the political scandals in Ohio], to the pay-to-play culture. It puts the world on notice that we’ll go after him. It also attacks the whole notion of DeWine as moderate.”
She added that she had “enormous concerns” that waiting could hurt fundraising for later ads.
David Doak laid out what a “perfect world” would look like in a campaign: “We’d go up first and define Sherrod in positive terms but choose those traits we’ll use to contrast him with DeWine. Then we’d hit hard on DeWine before he hits us. Then we’d hit hard in response after DeWine attacks Sherrod.”
That perfect world was also an imaginary world for the Sherrod Brown campaign. “I think DeWine will have more money than we do,” said Doak, “so we have to bypass the first stop and move right to the second.”
Tom O’Donnell posed the crucial question: Do we want to start this war early? “DeWine’s interest is to run us out of money early so they can overpower us in the fall,” O’Donnell said. “Do we want to start this war earlier than later?”
O’Donnell was also wondering just how much the DSCC would invest in Sherrod’s race, which was one of about a dozen competitive Senate races. “One thing that worries me is that the DSCC doesn’t think Ohio is special,” O’Donnell said. “Their only interest is how to get the majority for their bosses. If you’re in the hunt, you get the money. If not, you’re cut off.”
Doak agreed. “My experience is that at the end, whoever looks closest in the polls gets the money.”
The bang for the buck mattered, too, said Feldman. “If we’re two points ahead and Rhode Island is two points ahead, then they’re going to give it to the smaller, cheaper state because Ohio sucks up the money,” Feldman said.
“In the same way we strategize against the DSCC, they’re strategizing against us regarding the decision to help us early versus later,” Doak added.
Michael O’Neil, an Ohio native who worked for the DSCC, came over to our campaign to help with fundraising. He said our hunches were right. “Pretty much everything said here is true. The DSCC is going to give us a certain amount of money. After Labor Day, it may go up, but it won’t go down.”
Doak said that meant we needed to get aggressive—now: “That argues for doing what we need to do early to stay in the race. If we go soft, then DeWine will come back and cream us. Getting to DeWine early means we can paint the picture of DeWine.”
Feldman cautioned against using a strategy meant to pump up Sherrod. Her polling and focus group research indicated that was a losing strategy. “Having listened to these swing voters, I can tell you they’re not going to vote for anyone. As wonderful as Sherrod is, it is far harder to get them to believe in Sherrod Brown than it is to get them to vote against DeWine.”
O’Donnell was growing impatient on the call. “We have no idea what DSCC is willing to spend. This conversation is premature until we have some kind of ballpark figure from DSCC.”
And Feldman felt we were aiming too low in our fundraising goals.
“Our seven-million-dollar budget scares me,” she said. “We won’t be able to go up right after Labor Day.”
There seemed to be so many variables: O’Donnell said the only thing that would raise money for Sherrod was good poll numbers. Doak said we should look at this as a chess game: We have to anticipate DeWine’s moves. Then O’Donnell added that we had to be in a position to respond quickly, which meant having enough money to go up with ads.
Then we went back to the war analogy again.
“We can either start the war or wait for him to start the war,” Doak said. “DeWine could be saying, ‘What could the DSCC do with money if we start now?’ Republicans will spend more money than we do. ‘Early’ is not defined in calendar terms. It’s relative to the other person’s race. If DeWine goes up on TV, we can’t afford not to. If the DSCC won’t help, we’re going to have to gamble.”
Then he added that going early was not “in our strategic interest” because we didn’t have enough money.
In the alternative, we would have to rely on our press operation to get the word out, Feldman said. More news conferences, more radio calls, more interviews and press releases.
That conversation quickly returned to what the DSCC might, and might not, do to help Sherrod win.
“We can’t look at the DSCC as a savior,” Doak said, “but at some point we will have to be willing to gamble. The key question: We have to figure out what they will do for us. We don’t know how much they may give us, but we have to try to rope them into making them help us.”
O’Donnell wanted us to get aggressive on our own. “People aren’t in the mood to be romanced,” he said. “They want to see how the other guy’s a schmuck. DeWine had a $750,000 buy and look what it got him: Nothing.”
O’Donnell was right. Some public polls showed DeWine getting a slight bump, if any, from his puff ads, but our internal polling indicated that DeWine had just wasted a lot of money. Sherrod was pulling ahead.
Joanna raised the question Sherrod and I asked ourselves every day: “What if DeWine goes negative?”
“We have to go up,” Doak said. “We can’t worry about tomorrow. I trust Diane’s poll. After three weeks of TV, we’re ahead. We shouldn’t worry about these crazy public polls.”
Feldman recited her public poll primer that she would have to repeat many times to us during the campaign: “In some of these public polls, you’re talking to a lot of nonvoters and people who are paying absolutely no attention. It’s bad polling. I believe my poll is real and predictive.” (She ended up being right.)
Joanna wanted to know, if polling drove fundraising, which polls the DSCC was paying attention to.
For now, they were tracking Diane Feldman’s. That sharing of information, though, would end sometime in August because of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law, which forbids any communication between campaigns and independent groups. The DSCC was doing its own polling, too, and we would not be able to know their numbers, either.
There were a lot of sighs all the way around. Would the DSCC stay with us, or would we have to hold our own in the endgame?
As it turned out, the DSCC would help Sherrod more than any other Democratic Senate candidate in the country.
But on May 31, we didn’t know that. All we knew was that Mike DeWine had a lot more money than Sherrod, and he had a history of waging ugly campaigns.
We were stuck in a waiting game, hoping that money wasn’t the only thing that could defeat Mike DeWine.
thirteen
Coming Out
SOMETIMES I DIDN’T LIKE THE PEOPLE WHO SUPPOSEDLY WERE ON our side. Even worse, I didn’t like who I was when I was with them.
In early June, Sherrod and I attended a dinner for hundreds of Democratic supporters around the state, many of them major donors to political campaigns. An affluent couple was seated at our table, and when one of the evening’s speakers mentioned his Christian values from the stage, they started shaking their heads.
“I hate that Democrats are suddenly talking about their faith,” he said. “I think born-agains are idiots, but
I’ll fight for their right to be idiots—just keep them away from our government.”
I am an ardent advocate for separation of church and state, but his derision for born-again Christians wiped away any appetite I might have had for the dinner. I wanted to lean over and say, “My mother was a born-again Christian, and she was one of the kindest, most progressive people I’ve ever known.”
My mother, Janey, was devout, and she raised us to believe that being a Christian meant fixing ourselves and helping others, not the other way around. Her faith was simple: God loves everybody, no exceptions, and that’s the standard for the rest of us. While we did not agree on everything, my mother and I found common ground in the social justice issues driven by our faith. It stung to hear this man at the table lump my mother with the far-right fanatics who had co-opted our faith for their own political use.
This happened too often when I was in the company of fellow liberals. Many of them seemed to harbor a troubling disdain for other people’s practice of religion, and it was counter to what liberals are supposed to stand for, which is tolerance at all levels.
Every poll on religion shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in God, and Sherrod and I were meeting them every day on the campaign trail. We sat next to them in African American churches, where, without fail, someone always handed us their own Bible to follow along when the preacher recited scripture. They worked at homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and at family planning centers. They were accountants who worked after hours to help poor parents fill out forms for the Earned Income Tax Credit, well-paid union members fighting for an increase in the minimum wage, and lawyers volunteering to represent indigent defendants.
I didn’t say any of this to my dinner companions. In their eyes, I wasn’t Janey Schultz’s daughter, and I wasn’t a newspaper columnist. I was the wife of Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, and challenging them could hurt support for my husband. If I’d learned anything by June, it was that there was no such thing as a private conversation in politics. So, instead, I sat there and held my tongue, angrier at myself than at anything they had said.
. . . And His Lovely Wife Page 15