Later that same evening, the husband of Jennifer Brunner, a longtime friend of Sherrod’s who was running for secretary of state, helped soften the edges. Rick Brunner was a practicing lawyer who put his own career on hold for a year to work on his wife’s campaign. No matter how exhausted, he always beamed whenever he ran into us. He was having the time of his life. When we joined other statewide candidates and their spouses onstage, Rick turned to me and gushed, “Isn’t it great getting the chance to spend so much time together? I mean, I know it’s hard leaving your job, but isn’t it wonderful to travel so much together?”
I had to admit he was right. This was the most time Sherrod and I had spent together since we’d married two years before, and the rigors of campaign life were actually bringing us closer.
“You learn so much about someone when you spend this amount of time together,” I shouted over the din of the music and applause. “Good things. You learn a lot of good stuff.”
He grinned. “Yeah, you sure do.”
I watched big burly Rick standing next to his wife, his hand resting gently on her back as she waved to the crowd. Every muscle in his face telegraphed what he was thinking: “Look at my wife. Ain’t she something?”
“What are you smiling about?” Sherrod asked. He knew these staged events seldom brought out my cheerful side.
“Oh, nothing,” I said, reaching for the curls that were no longer on his head. “Oy. This hair.”
“It’ll grow back, baby,” he said, pulling me close in front of the hundreds of cheering people. “It’ll all grow back.”
IN RETROSPECT, I SEE THAT JUNE WAS MY “COMING OUT” MONTH in the campaign. Finally, I had found ways to use my journalist’s skills to feel useful in my husband’s race.
The first break came when Romi Lassally, features editor for Arianna Huffington’s progressive blog, The Huffington Post, sent an e-mail asking me to write about Sherrod’s campaign. Her father-in-law, Peter Lassally, had told her I was on a leave of absence but itching to write. Peter had produced Johnny Carson’s show, and now did the same thing for Craig Ferguson. We had gotten to know each other over dinner one night with his remarkable wife, writer Alice Lassally, and my friend Michael Naidus, who set up the whole thing because he never stopped looking out for me. Now, apparently Peter had taken on that job, too.
Romi is forty-three, a married mother of three with boundless energy who almost single-handedly breathed new life into me as a writer. She didn’t know that. In fact, she acted as if I were doing her the favor when she asked me to write dispatches from the road. Her timing could not have been better.
Romi’s first e-mail came on the heels of a disappointing exchange I’d had with an editor from Women’s eNews, a blog originating in New York. Its mission statement reads, “Women’s eNews is the definitive source of substantive news—unavailable anywhere else—covering issues of particular concern to women and providing women’s perspectives on public policy. It enhances women’s ability to define their own lives and to participate fully in every sector of human endeavor.”
A local freelance writer had pitched a profile of me to Women’s eNews, but their senior editor dismissed the idea out of hand because I had taken a leave for my “hubby,” as she put it.
The writer was stunned, and I was furious. I’ve been a feminist since my late teens, and the response of this editor, who was almost exactly my age, triggered old memories of my time as a stay-at-home mother, when I felt judged as pointless by some women who had full-time careers. The whole point of feminism was to provide a full palette of options for women, and then respect the choices they made for their own lives. We are not a monolithic group—wasn’t that our point?
I wrote to that editor, assuring her that I was not trying to persuade her to change her mind about covering me, but I did hope she wouldn’t write off the next feminist whose choices didn’t meet her criteria for a meaningful life. I laid out my reasons for taking a leave of absence, and ended my letter with a plea:
Please try harder in the future to cast a wider net when deciding which women merit your attention. I’ve been a feminist since adolescence, and at 48, I’m still meeting women who make me stretch the boundaries of how we define the word and embrace the cause.
Instead of addressing the issue, she responded by asking me to write for their website. I declined, assuring her that I suspected no evil motives on her part but did hope we could pursue the discussion of how we define feminism. She wasn’t interested in that. Instead, she accused me of overreacting to her original note. She did, however, apologize for calling Sherrod my “hubby.”
See why I was so happy to hear from Romi Lassally?
I wrote only four pieces for The Huffington Post, including one on why Sherrod and I weren’t afraid of Republican smear tactics, but my lack of contributions wasn’t because Romi wasn’t prodding me for more. She was always coming up with column ideas, and she was a wonderful sounding board for me whenever I needed to vent about life on the road.
“Oh, you should write about that!” she’d say. “Oh, that one, too, that would make a great column!”
Campaigning, I found, sucked up most of my energy, and I ended up not writing as much as I’d hoped after a daily regimen of note taking. But I am so grateful to Romi for believing that this wife, on a leave of absence from her own career, still had something worth saying.
THE OTHER BREAK FOR ME CAME AFTER I BOUNCED AN IDEA OFF Sherrod and John Ryan.
We knew Sherrod could not possibly visit every town and village in Ohio. So, what if we used me to focus on small towns, where so many working-class voters lived and worked? I was a small-town girl myself, having grown up in Ashtabula in a blue-collar life right out of a Bruce Springsteen song. I could talk to people and, more important, listen to them and take notes, with the promise that I would share their hopes and concerns with Sherrod.
John and Sherrod loved the idea, and John suggested calling it Connie’s Hometown Tour. We scheduled five to seven stops in a single day across several counties, with Sherrod recording radio ads that would run a few days before each visit asking folks to welcome his wife, Connie, to their hometown. Joanna and her press team did advance work with the media to attract coverage in many of the smaller newspapers and local radio and TV stations. I soon learned that small-town reporters enjoyed chatting with a fellow journalist from Ohio’s largest newspaper. I knew I was really succumbing to campaign fever when I celebrated any headline that called me “Sherrod Brown’s Wife.”
I had various drivers during that time, and they all felt like family after a while. If ever there is an unsung hero in a campaign—besides the scheduler—it is the driver. You count on him to stay awake when you’re exhausted and to get you there on time no matter what obstacles roll out in front of you. He is forever on the lookout for the perfect parking space and tolerable bathroom stop, and his radar is always up for the other party’s trackers, who hope to capture you on videotape in a clumsy or, God forbid, inappropriate moment. The driver makes sure you always have enough brochures, buttons, and stickers, keeps the car stocked with bottled water, and listens as you practice material for speeches.
One more thing: Our drivers had to keep to themselves everything they heard in the car. In that spirit, we nicknamed the campaign car “Vegas.”
Three young men drove me: Chris Stelmarski, a newly minted high school graduate who doubled as our IT guy because he’d never met a computer problem he couldn’t solve; Zach West, a recent college graduate who lived and breathed politics, having known Sherrod since the day he was born; and Ben Nyhan, another recent college graduate of unflappable resolve, who volunteered for us long before he was paid and never stopped thanking me for the adventure of a lifetime.
Field staff and volunteers, under the direction of John Hagner, “outperformed their résumés,” as John Ryan always put it. They built events for Sherrod and me throughout the campaign.
None of the hometown tours would have worked without Wendy
Leatherberry, a seasoned veteran activist at age thirty-one, who used up weeks of vacation from her social services job to volunteer as my ever-present traveling companion.
Wendy was raised to save the world. She is the only child of Bill Leatherberry and Diane Phillips-Leatherberry. They named her childhood cat Sam, after Sam Ervin of Watergate fame. When she was six, they took her to the swearing-in ceremonies for Ohio’s new governor and newly elected secretary of state, Sherrod Brown. She was in second grade and was supposed to write a report about her experience as a trade-off for missing school, but the teachers in her school district ended up being on strike that week. Her mother took her to the picket line so that Wendy could give her report in person.
In 1986, writer Jimmy Breslin interviewed eleven-year-old Wendy after a confluence of circumstances alerted him to her desire to be president of the United States. When he asked her what her first act as president would be, the little squirt didn’t hesitate. She told him she would withdraw William Rehnquist’s nomination for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
In seventh grade, she was already donating babysitting money to a presidential campaign, insisting that her parents allow her to buy a money order so that Joe Biden would know the money came directly from her. When she was a freshman in college on a visit home to celebrate Passover, her mother insisted they have dinner at a shopping center in the black community where someone had recently been shot. The point of this impromptu excursion was to prove that white people weren’t afraid.
By the time I met Wendy, she had already held significant roles in several campaigns and was the youngest member and only woman on the Cleveland Heights–University Heights school board. She was also board president, and I bragged about her constantly in speeches, especially when the room was full of women.
Wendy had been a steadfast reader of my column and a friend, so she already knew we had a lot in common. What she didn’t know at first was how uncomfortable I was with campaigning.
I wasn’t accustomed to approaching strangers without a reporter’s notebook. It was one thing to be armed with a pen and pad and scribbling down the answers to questions I asked. It was another to thrust out my hand and try to convince someone visiting the cow barn at the county fair that they should care about my husband. I wince at how awkward I felt when I showed up at diners or festivals and interrupted someone’s conversation to talk about a Senate race that hadn’t even crossed their minds.
After one particularly hot and exhausting round of county fairs, I wanted to put a stop to those visits—and the tours. I was not convinced we were doing any good, and my asthma was acting up. I was tired of wheezing my way through dusty days. Wendy had the courage to sit down and write me a lengthy e-mail about why I needed to keep going.
“The whole point of the Hometown Tour is to show people in smaller communities that they matter,” she wrote.
It’s a fact that county fairs are a huge focal point in many of these communities. I think that leaves us in the position of requesting that field staff structure our participation in fairs for the most positive experience it can be…. We all found [a previous tour] a useful exercise because you were able to meet and talk with “real voters” who aren’t already engaged in some way….
I picked up the phone.
“Oh, okay, I’ll go,” I told her, “as long as you’re with me.”
“Deal.”
Wendy was always at my side, taking notes, reminding me of names, spotting people I ought to meet. She was also good at whisking me off when it was time to go.
Everything, it seemed, came with a learning curve. I was used to giving speeches, but not the kind that began and ended with my husband’s opinions, and I was as bored as the rooms full of people listening to me had to be as I rambled on about health care this and lost jobs that, constantly peppering my remarks with references to Sherrod.
I had been brainstorming with Wendy on how to pump up the talks, and she kept pushing me to tell stories from my own life. I wasn’t convinced that anyone would care about that. Then one evening I stood within spitting distance of yet another man suggesting I didn’t know my place because I wouldn’t change my name.
We were in a working-class town in eastern Ohio, where almost 150 people, mostly older couples, had gathered for an annual Democratic dinner. I was scheduled to speak for Sherrod, and the man in his seventies who introduced me said, “Well, now we’re going to hear from Sherrod Brown’s wife. She’s one of those women who won’t change her name, but here she is.”
I saw Wendy exchange glances with our driver, Chris, and then she shot me a weak smile. I returned the smile, and hers vanished. She knew I was up to something.
“Well, that’s right,” I said, standing in front of the room. “I didn’t change my name. It’s Connie Schultz, and let me tell you why.”
I explained how Sherrod and I had been married less than two years, and how I was already entrenched in a career where my name was my currency. Then I shook my head.
“But you know what? That’s not the only reason I kept this name. I want to tell you about my parents.”
I told them the story of Janey and Chuck Schultz, how neither of them had gone to college but insisted on it for their four children.
“My mother was a nurse’s aide and a hospice worker. My father was a union member and worked for the utility company in a job he hated every day of his life. My mother died at sixty-two. My dad just died of a heart attack at sixty-nine. My parents wore their bodies out so that we’d never have to, and one of the reasons I fell in love with Sherrod Brown was because he has spent his entire career fighting for the people I come from.”
By the time I was finished, many in the room were wiping away tears, including the man who had refused to introduce me by name.
“I think Schultz is a wonderful name!” he announced from the front of the room. “I don’t think you should ever drop your daddy’s name.”
He walked me all the way to the car, telling me he’d just had heart surgery himself and sometimes it clouded his thinking. I gave him a big hug and told him I hoped he felt better real soon.
“You need anything, Sherrod needs anything, you give us a call,” he said through my open window. “We’re going to make him the next senator from Ohio.”
Wendy waited until we pulled away.
“Told you.”
“Sorry?”
“Told you to start telling your own story.”
“Yeah. Well. Some things you learn the hard way.”
From then on, Mom and Dad were on the campaign trail with me, and the going got a lot easier.
One evening, after a long Hometown Tour day, my godson, Davis Filippell, rode home with us. Davis’s parents, Mark and Buffy, had stood by me during the most difficult time in my life, when I was going through my divorce in the early 1990s. I have known Davis since the moment of his birth, and at age sixteen he was proving to be a devoted campaign volunteer, calling voters from headquarters, doing advance work for campaign stops, and stepping up wherever he was needed. This was his first time working for a political campaign, and our first time together on the campaign trail. On the ride home I asked him what he thought he had learned so far.
“This is so much more work than I had imagined,” he said. “Everybody works so hard every day for months and months—and at the end of it all, you can still lose.”
I looked at his face, and realized he was really worried that Sherrod would not win.
“You know what,” I said, “Sherrod’s going to be home when we get there. Why don’t you talk to him about that?”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
As soon as Davis and I walked through the door, Sherrod asked how our day had gone. I turned to Davis and said, “Go ahead. Tell Sherrod what you asked me in the car.”
I watched my godson and my husband standing less than a foot apart in our kitchen as Davis laid out his concerns and Sherrod answered.
“Davis, poli
tics can be cruel,” Sherrod said. “In primaries, you can have a lot of losers, but always only one winner.”
Sherrod looked at Davis’s worried face and smiled.
“Nobody’s working harder than we are, Davis. And there’s no way Mike DeWine and his people are working as hard as we are. And that’s why we’re going to win.”
Davis smiled, and Sherrod shook his hand.
“They also don’t have you,” Sherrod said. “No way are we going to lose.”
WENDY INADVERTENTLY HELPED ME FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE IN my own skin, too. With a camera always in tow, she took photos everywhere we went, and she encouraged me to write stories for the campaign’s website about the people we met and the places we visited. I did a little of this, but I was uncomfortable writing what amounted to a society column, and I cringed at the sight of so many bad photos of me posted on the Web.
I had expected others to scrutinize my appearance. I had followed the coverage of Theresa Heinz Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards, and I knew how cruel writers could be in the name of journalism. What I didn’t expect was my own sudden obsession with how I looked on any given day.
There was something about the honesty of photos taken in broad daylight that forced me to come to terms with an essential truth I had managed to dodge when no one was constantly aiming a camera at me: I was no longer thirty. I wasn’t even forty. I was one year from fifty, and the longer I campaigned, the more I looked it. Sherrod kept telling me I was beautiful, but fatigue dulls the hearing, I guess. I also knew my lifestyle had morphed into one of inertia, of an armchair quarterback. I went from exercising and walking on a regular basis to spending entire days plopped in a car. Healthful meals were rare, as was a full night’s sleep. You have to be twelve for that not to take a toll.
. . . And His Lovely Wife Page 16