It came to a head—my head, actually—one morning after Wendy e-mailed some recent shots from a Hometown Tour and I almost started to cry at the sight of me. I had to change the way I looked at myself, and I had to change now. I was spending more time worrying about how high I had to hold my chin to have just one than about how I could reach people with a message of hope. That was not the woman I knew, and I didn’t like her much.
It hadn’t helped that women I didn’t know felt free to give unsolicited advice on everything about me, from the length of my hair to the cut of my coat to the way I looked at my husband whenever he spoke. I was no stranger to that kind of meddling, though. I’d been getting free criticism about my hair and the shape of my face from women readers ever since I started writing a column. I made matters worse by wearing stiff suits that made me feel sawed off at the waist by the end of the day. I’d never been one to wear a lot of business suits. Why on earth was I doing it now? Who said this had to be the uniform?
I changed my outfits, and my attitude, and the funny thing is, when I browse through campaign photos now, I look just fine in most of them. I do, however, lament the time and energy I wasted worrying about that, especially when I think of some of the women I met during those Hometown Tours.
There were whole rooms full of feisty women who decided to form their own activist groups because, as one woman in Knox County told me, “We got tired of the men at Democratic headquarters asking us to make coffee and do the Xeroxing.” It was heartening to see so many women, most of them at least in their forties, and many of them a lot older, organizing to change the country. At an age when our culture wants us to believe women become invisible, these women were bigger than life. They were meeting in the smallest of villages and the largest of cities, and they loved hearing stories about women like them whenever I showed up.
Two women are lodged in my memory from the Hometown Tours. One of them, Mona Parsons, was a member of Military Families Speak Out. Her son had served in Iraq, and he made it home safely. He came home, though, to a different mother. She wanted to bring all the troops home, and she approached me before I spoke at a women’s event in Knox County.
“Do you mind if I say a few words before you speak?”
“Of course not,” I said. I’d lost count of how many women thought they needed permission to join the discussion.
She leaned in, and I could barely hear her. “I’m not a very good speaker,” she said. “I get all nervous, and my voice trembles.”
I reminded her of the advice of Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers: “Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”
She smiled at that, and nodded. “Okay, then.”
The entire room grew silent as she spoke from her heart, asking them to pray for the safety of the troops and demand their safe return home.
Another woman, a mother in Appalachia, became one of my regular stories—and Sherrod’s—on the road after she knocked the wind out of me at a potluck dinner.
She was in her mid-thirties, her four-year-old daughter at her side. She was wearing a cap on her bald head. She had just finished treatment for breast cancer, and all I could think about at first was how scared she must have been with cancer in her breast and a child so young.
We sat together for dinner before my speech, and she told me that I shouldn’t worry about her. “I’m going to be fine,” she said, smiling. Then she gestured to the crowd of women in the room. “But these people here? These people need hope.”
After my short talk, we headed out for the next stop on our long drive home. Before I climbed into the car, Wendy handed me a $200 check that the mother had written to Sherrod’s campaign. Drawing a deep breath, Wendy told me what the woman had said as she handed her the check.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I had to postdate it. I don’t get paid until Friday.”
fourteen
Karl Rove’s Blunder
ON THE MORNING OF FRIDAY, JULY 14, SHERROD AND I BOARDED exactly the sort of plane I had made him promise he would never, ever use.
I should have known something was up when we had to give our weight before we were allowed to board. It was an eight-seater, single-pilot flight from Boston to Nantucket, where we were headed for a series of fundraisers. I pulled out my digital camera, snapped a photo, and then fired off an e-mail from my BlackBerry to our scheduler, Shana Johnson:
How is it that I can see the mole on the back of our pilot’s neck? you ask. Because I was in the last seat on this plane, and it was only FOUR SEATS AWAY from the ONE man charged with keeping us from nose-diving into the sea. How did this happen????
It had been an eventful month so far. Two new public polls showed Sherrod leading DeWine by six to eight points. And after months of angry outbursts about Sherrod, his former Democratic primary opponent, Paul Hackett, had publicly apologized and declared his support. Paul’s wife, Suzi, and their three young children circled him at the joint news conference. As I watched first Paul and then Sherrod address the crowd in the 95-degree Cincinnati heat, I felt as if we were witnessing a holy moment in an unholy profession. It generated a lot of press coverage, in Ohio and across the country.
Their truce was a personal victory for Dayton blogger Chris Baker, editor of Ohio 2nd, who originally had supported Hackett. Baker was a smart and dedicated progressive, and he had posted a lengthy interview with Sherrod and then lobbied Hackett to mend the hole in that fence. Baker made all the difference. Sherrod and Hackett’s public embrace buoyed party activists in Ohio and boosted fundraising, particularly in California, where some liberal donors had refused to support Sherrod, despite his thirty-year record of progressive politics, because they believed the national Democratic party had forced Hackett out of the race.
I tried to focus on this, the good news of the campaign, rather than the realization that the pilot had just opened a window—a window—to let in some fresh air. I thought all planes had to be hermetically sealed to stay in the air, so this was a disconcerting development, to say the least.
Shana called me as soon as we landed. It should be noted that she was having a hard time stifling her giggles.
“Connie?”
“Shana.”
“Seriously, Connie,” she said, not sounding serious at all, “it was the only way to get you to the island, unless you wanted to take a really long boat ride.”
“You know how I feel about these planes.”
“Yeah, but I thought you only meant you didn’t want Sherrod to go down alone on one of them. You know, because of how much you love each other and everything.”
“You’re joking.”
“Well.”
“Did Sherrod know we’d be on this plane?”
Silence.
“Shana?”
“I can’t speak to what is in the candidate’s head.”
That was all I needed to know.
I bade Shana good-bye and turned to my husband.
“You knew.”
“What?”
“You knew what kind of plane we’d be on.”
He sighed. “You told me long ago to stop worrying about these kinds of details. I’m focused on winning a Senate race, just like you said.”
Silence.
“You did say that,” he said.
Then it hit me.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“How are we getting back?”
He wrapped his arm around me and led me off the tarmac.
“Try not to think about that, honey.”
Only 115 more days. And counting.
WE WEREN’T ON THE ISLAND FOR MORE THAN A HALF-HOUR WHEN Joanna called with news that would alter the course of the campaign.
“Well, the day we were waiting for has arrived,” she said.
Mike DeWine had gone up with his first attack ad on TV. It included video of the burning Twin Towers, and it hit Sherrod hard on national security. DeWine started running the ad on a Friday, knowing we would not be able to answer with our own
ad until Monday.
“It looks like a big buy, too,” Joanna said. What she meant was that Ohioans all across the state would see it, and we couldn’t respond until Monday because TV stations don’t staff their advertising departments on weekends.
Joanna immediately began setting up a conference call to brainstorm our response. One of the first things Sherrod did was call his eighty-six-year-old mother. “I don’t want you finding out about this on TV,” he said.
Then we let our four children know, so that they wouldn’t hear about it from someone else. Caitlin, our youngest and new to politics, was working at her summer job as a camp counselor for preschoolers when I reached her.
She greeted my news with silence.
“Cait?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yeah, Mom,” she said softly. “I’m just letting it sink in.”
Within the hour, we were on a conference call with the Triplets, our nickname for our consultants, David Doak, Tom O’Donnell, and Mattis Goldman. Our pollster, Diane Feldman; DSCC executive director J. B. Poersch; campaign manager John Ryan; and Joanna were also on the call.
“Apparently, we’re the first Senate challenger to be attacked,” Joanna said.
“We’ve got to respond and hit back,” said O’Donnell. “This is going to be a lot of voters’ first impression of Sherrod Brown. Women who are otherwise with us have concerns about national security.”
“This ad is so unbelievable that if we refute it, voters will believe us,” Doak said.
“And I’d prefer that the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] pay for the ad,” added O’Donnell.
That was the big question: Who would pay for our response ad? Fundraising was picking up, but we still were far from where we needed to be before we felt comfortable spending the nearly $1 million we’d need to compete with DeWine’s buy. We needed the DSCC’s resources, and for a few more weeks, our campaign was allowed to communicate directly with them. In the last months of the campaign, new campaign finance laws would prevent cooperation between candidates, on the one hand, and special-interest groups and party committees on the other. In July, we were still allowed to know in advance if the DSCC would help us, which allowed us to save our money for the last weeks of the campaign. Soon, by law, that light would go dark, and the rest of the campaign would involve a lot of guessing on our part, never knowing when we would have help and when we’d have to go it alone.
By the end of our first conference call, we knew what our ad should say, but we had no idea who would pay for it.
Senator Chuck Schumer solved that riddle in the time it took him to beeline his way to me at our first, crowded event on Nantucket. He grabbed my hand as if he’d known me forever and said, “Connie, I know what you want to know, and I’m going to tell you right now: We’re going to fight back, we’re going to pay for the ad, and we’ll be up on TV by Monday.”
The wife in me wanted to hug him, but the journalist in me prevailed. I grabbed his hand with both of mine, and thanked him for believing in my husband.
Sherrod and I didn’t actually see DeWine’s ad until a few hours later, when Guy Cecil, political director with the DSCC, showed us on his laptop.
As much as I had tried to brace myself for the onslaught of ugly ads against Sherrod, I was still unprepared for the first time I watched his picture juxtaposed with the horrible images from September 11,2001. It wasn’t just that the ad lied about my husband’s voting record on terrorism. That was bad enough, but I was stunned by DeWine’s trafficking in national tragedy for political gain.
It’s impossible to gauge how many Americans were hurt or offended by the ad, which was covered on blogs and in national broadcasts. There were all the families, of course, the ones who lost loved ones when the Twin Towers burst into flames. The ad began with DeWine insisting he approved it, and then turned to an image of the blazing towers.
I also wondered how many children saw the ad. There had to be so many children whose hearts still raced at the sight of those horrifying images. It was, after all, a day that changed all of us. We soon found out that the ad was the handiwork of the same firm that had produced the 2004 Swift Boat ads against John Kerry, which falsely accused him of lying about his military service in Vietnam.
DeWine’s spokesman told The Plain Dealer, “This is chapter one.”
Chapter two came sooner than DeWine expected. A few days after DeWine’s attack ad went up, U.S. News World Report’s Bret Schulte discovered that DeWine had used a doctored image of the Twin Towers. Apparently, the tragedy wasn’t quite tragic enough, and an effort to depict more smoke after the first plane hit rendered the wrong tower on fire.
Minutes after Schulte’s story hit the Web, reporters started calling our campaign. Journalists across the country weighed in. Some journalists described the deceit as simply politics as usual—a “misstep,” or, as one reporter put it, a mere “hiccup.” Washington Post columnist Al Kamen wrote, “This could be a very fun race.”
Others, though, were not so willing to play into the tired old argument that nasty campaigns were as inevitable as Ohio sweet corn in August. As one reporter told us, “DeWine’s nice-guy image is gone for good.” Several journalists made it clear that they learned a hard lesson from the 2004 presidential race, when reporters waited too long to investigate the false allegations in the Swift Boat ads. This time, some reporters examined DeWine’s claims point by point and exposed the distortions. They promised they would hold us to the same standard, which is what good journalists do.
At the time, DeWine attempted to dismiss the ad as a mistake by the consultants. He didn’t fire them, though, and he continued to run the ad, complete with a new image of the smoldering Twin Towers. Three weeks later, The New York Times confirmed that Karl Rove, the White House strategist behind so many ugly Republican campaign tactics, had pressured DeWine to run the ad. As it turned out, it set the tone for many of DeWine’s later ads, and some political analysts now say his campaign never recovered from that initial blunder. It set up DeWine as a desperate and nasty candidate who would do anything to win, and Ohioans had had enough of that kind of politics.
It was also a turning point for us. Every campaign has its junctures, and the first DeWine ad presented two options for Sherrod, who had to decide how he would conduct himself in the face of the ugliness we had known was coming. A week after DeWine’s ad first ran, Sherrod sat down at his computer and typed a letter explaining his decision to his entire campaign staff.
It was a rare afternoon at home for us, and I could hear the click-click-click of his keyboard as I folded laundry down the hall. It had been a long but exhilarating week for everyone, and he knew exactly what he wanted to say. I didn’t read his letter until it popped up in my own e-mail box.
First, he praised his campaign field operation for recruiting hundreds of volunteers to march in more than a dozen parades over a single weekend in southeastern Ohio. Then Sherrod turned to what he knew was on everybody’s minds.
He assured our young and devoted staff that DeWine’s sleaze tactics were wheezing gasps in a lifeless campaign. Then he reminded them why our campaign was so different:
On our side, there is a palpable passion for change, an enthusiasm the state hasn’t seen since 1982 (before most of you were born), and a belief that our country can do a lot better. And we will continue to run an aggressive, always honest and honorable campaign to get there.
Long before a single vote had been counted, we’d already won.
fifteen
Dream On
IN A MESSAGE DATED AUGUST 1, 2006, A STAFF MEMBER FORWARDED an e-mail from the man hired to direct Sherrod’s TV commercials, who instructed me to provide the following:
THURSDAY’S WARDROBE
Business-Professional Wear:
Three suits
Three blue dress shirts, could have slight color/style variations
Three white or off-white dress shi
rts
One of another shade or color if he has it and it works with whatever suit he brings
Eight ties, including two power red ties
Business Casual Wear, as if walking in a parade or going to the county fair:
Two pairs of tan/brown-tone khakis
One pair of khakis in dark color, navy, black, deep green
Six casual button-down shirts, try to bring a mix of colors that will work with the above khakis
Miscellaneous:
Handful of T-shirts for underneath
Comfortable shoes, since we won’t really see his feet
FRIDAY’S WARDROBE:
Business-Professional Wear:
Three suits—two should be different than the day before, and one of them should be his ultimate power suit
Another three blue dress shirts, could have slight color/style variations
Another three white or off-white dress shirts
One of another shade or color if he has it and it works with the suits
Eight ties including 2 power red ties…at least 4 different than what was brought on Thursday
Business Casual Wear, as if walking in a parade or going to the county fair:
Two pairs of tan/brown-tone khakis, can be the same as Thursday
One pair khakis in dark color, navy, black, deep green—can be same as Thursday
Six casual button-down shirts, try to bring a mix of colors that will work with the above khakis—hopefully half are different than Thursday’s
Miscellaneous:
Handful of T-shirts for underneath
Comfortable shoes, since we won’t really see his feet
In a message also dated August 1, 2006, I sent this response:
I just read the wardrobe list and you can tell the director to dream on. We’ll have a mix, but not nearly the number he wants, especially on such short notice. Sherrod will look fine.
Sherrod doesn’t own that many suits, and I can’t imagine there is a single one that he considers his “power suit.” (How silly.) Clearly, this director hasn’t met my husband.
. . . And His Lovely Wife Page 17