. . . And His Lovely Wife

by Connie Schultz

  Then the camera cut to Sherrod, who walked in shirtsleeves along a chain-link fence with a “Closed Plant” sign as he spoke:

  “My opponent supported the trade agreements that cost us these jobs. He said, ‘It’s just business.’ I say it’s wrong.”

  Sherrod stopped walking and stood facing the camera with his hands on his hips:

  “I’m Sherrod Brown, I approve this message. In the Senate I’ll judge U.S. trade agreements by this standard: Are they fair to America? Do they put Americans first?”

  Everywhere we went, people commented on that ad. Sherrod looked strong, they said, like a fighter, and he was fighting for them.

  The other most popular ad from our campaign came at the end, when Sherrod looked directly at the camera and, over a soft soundtrack, talked directly to the voters:

  “Before I ask for your vote, I owe it to you to tell you where I stand: I’m for an increase in the minimum wage and against trade agreements that cost Ohio jobs. I support stem cell research, tighter borders, and a balanced budget.”

  Another man’s voice listed some of Sherrod’s votes that reflected his stands on these issues, and then Sherrod reappeared:

  “I’m Sherrod Brown, I approve this message, it’s time to put the middle class first.”

  No matter how nasty DeWine’s ads got—and they got mighty ugly toward the end—we always made sure these ads ran, in addition to our response ads, at least some of the time. We knew by our polling and focus groups that voters responded to Sherrod whenever he spoke directly to them. He meant what he said, and that came through in his ads.

  The DSCC ran a series of its own ads for Sherrod, which we never knew about until they were on the air. Former senator John Glenn stepped up and filmed a positive piece.

  Jan Kellar, the mother of an Iraq War veteran, also did an ad for Sherrod. We had first met Jan during Sherrod’s announcement tour. Out of the blue, she spoke up at our next-to-last stop in Akron in December 2005. In a strong voice, she told the roomful of people that when she wrote to Mike DeWine about the lack of body armor for her son and other troops, he responded with a form letter that didn’t even mention body armor. She had heard that Sherrod was helping military families get the supplies they needed, so she called his office, even though he wasn’t her congressman.

  “My son got the body armor he needed,” she said. She had come to Sherrod’s announcement just to thank him.

  “Let’s make sure we get her name and contact information,” I said to Joanna that day.

  Joanna smiled. “Already on it.”

  If she was willing, Jan would be a valuable spokeswoman when—not if—DeWine attacked Sherrod for not supporting the troops, which was a common Republican tactic against Democrats who voted against the war. We are so grateful she was willing to film the ad, even though she admitted to great nervousness about such a public act of support.

  To the occasional chagrin of our consultants, the DSCC paid for some clever ads produced by Mandy Grunwald, who is perhaps best known for her work for Bill and Hillary Clinton. We never saw these ads until they were on the air, and Mandy had a humorous touch that made for some entertaining moments, such as the ad that featured a photo of DeWine and Bush laughing it up as children sang:

  The more we work together, together, together,

  The more we work together, the happier we’ll be.

  ’Cause your friends are my friends and my friends are your friends,

  The more we work together, the happier we’ll be.

  That was just one of several ads that Mandy and her team came up with for Sherrod during the campaign, and Sherrod was grateful for Mandy’s efforts—and the laughs.

  IN THE LAST MONTH OF THE CAMPAIGN, TWO THINGS WOULD GET the word out about Sherrod Brown: millions of dollars of advertising, and televised debates. We could control the content of our ads, but debates were a whole other monster to wrestle. The race could be won or lost right there, in front of thousands—sometimes millions—of viewers, and so debate prep was crucial. Sherrod and DeWine had agreed to four debates, and the first one was scheduled for October 1, when they would debate on Meet the Press.

  Before a campaign decides how to prepare a candidate for debate, it must decide who will prepare him. This was a dicier undertaking than I realized, because it quickly became clear that some in Sherrod’s life clearly measured their worth to the campaign by whether they were included in debate prep. Unfortunately, some of those insisting they had to be part of the process were unlikely to help Sherrod improve. And as he kept saying, he really needed to improve. Sherrod always agreed to debate his Congressional opponents. But he had not had a real debate—or a real race—for more than a decade.

  Sherrod had been in politics for more than thirty years by the time he ran for the Senate, and so he had collected a vast number of acquaintances who, in one way or another, felt they were mini-experts on Sherrod. Not coincidentally, these were inevitably men, and they were rather forceful in exerting their expertise. As Joanna joked in an e-mail to me after one round of debate prep, “I think I’ll go have a big bowl of testosteroni now.”

  The atmosphere was mighty charged. The chance to take aim at everything the candidate says can turn into a blood sport in the wrong hands. The challenge in debate prep was to include those whose only agenda was to help Sherrod improve, not to show off how clever they could be or whose strong personalities intimidated those on staff who were less forceful but unrivaled experts in their fields.

  Even the best of debate prep is grueling, amounting to one long pick, pick, pick at the poor candidate. Sometimes I would close my eyes and just listen:

  Say this, but don’t say it like that.

  Don’t say that, unless you put it like this.

  Stand up. Lean in. Not that far. No, now you’re too far back.

  Quit blinking so much.

  Remember to blink or you look like a deer.

  Don’t smile there, but do, yeah, right there, smile right there.

  And that was a session that was going well.

  Debate prep was always a delicate dance. Too much criticism, and Sherrod would end up deflated. Too little, and he’d be a pig stuck in mud when DeWine started swinging.

  Sherrod wanted nothing to do with choosing the debate prep team. Ever the get-along guy, he was worried about offending friends and family members, and so he left it to two people—campaign manager John Ryan and consultant Tom O’Donnell—to decide who would and would not help.

  The core group included Ryan, O’Donnell and his colleague David Doak, Joanna, our pollster Diane Feldman and her colleague Roy Temple, and our chief researcher, Anne Davis. Several others, including staffers Eleanor Dehoney, Liz Farrar, and Jack Dover and former Clinton deputy chief of staff Steve Ricchetti, also provided valuable insights.

  John Ryan insisted that I sit in on all of the sessions too.

  “Why?” I wasn’t really looking forward to watching Sherrod get hammered by a roomful of people who thought they had a better version of my husband in their pile of notes.

  He smiled and shook his head. “I keep telling you, Connie, he does better when you’re with him. And he’s less likely to lose his temper if you’re in the room.”

  At first, the star of debate prep was not the candidate but his chief debate coach, former congressman Dennis Eckart. Dennis had retired from the House in 1992 and was now a practicing attorney in Cleveland. He was funny and charming and had a long history of giving national candidates a real workout in debate prep. Dennis was on board because he wanted Sherrod to win, he assured me, and that could make for some bumpy road.

  “Some spouses hate me by the time it’s over,” he said. And then he grinned.

  Dennis and Sherrod had been roommates nearly thirty years earlier when they both served in the Ohio General Assembly, and their predictable rivalry—both of them were young, smart, and handsome—had given way over the years to a camaraderie born of accomplished lives and maturing perspectives. Sherrod
respected Dennis, but he also really liked him, which helps when you’ve got somebody pummeling you into pesto, as happened on the first day of debate prep in late September.

  To prepare for the debate, Dennis watched hours of videotape of both Mike DeWine and Sherrod. Press conferences, speeches, old commercials—he watched all of them, and discerned their habits.

  “Most folks have habits,” he told me. “So do politicians. Styles get recognizable; they get comfortable with certain words, phrases, and the same old story, stump speech, ‘magic words’ right on schedule.” He paid particular attention to DeWine’s ugly race against Senator John Glenn in 1992, when he attacked Glenn’s patriotism.

  Dennis noticed that above all else, DeWine was disciplined. “I counted on him not breaking out of his predictable modes, although I concede it wasn’t always clear which DeWine you would get in any given event—nice Mike, or rough Mike.”

  Let’s just say nice Mike took a long vacation.

  Sherrod and DeWine had a trial run of sorts in early August, when they agreed to a taped interview at Lakeland Community College. While not billed as a debate, it involved a back-and-forth between the two candidates that gave us an idea of what we could expect in future debates. DeWine was aggressive and bullying. Sherrod pulled punches at first, as if he were caught off guard to find himself sitting next to rough Mike and trying to figure out just how hard he could punch back.

  That day I had my first, and only, conversation with DeWine’s wife, Fran. It didn’t go well. She shook hands only after I offered mine, and rebuffed my attempts at conversation during breaks in the taping. She had been in politics with her husband for more than thirty years, and I was stunned at her open unfriendliness. I was brand-new at this political-wife gig, but I knew one of the roles I was supposed to play was the public optimist. The mantra was always: My husband’s going to win, you betcha.

  Fran DeWine’s silence told me everything I needed to know about the DeWine mind-set.

  “They know they’re in trouble,” I told Sherrod on the ride home. It was the first time I thought DeWine knew he could lose.

  Dennis wrote in an e-mail to me that the Lakeland interview showed him how far Sherrod had to go to be ready for a real debate with DeWine:

  I knew Sherrod wasn’t that serious about this yet, and that was probably also true about DeWine. It is so hard to get candidates and campaigns to give them the time they need to make prep work right. That’s why I wanted an early free-form opportunity, both to assess our opponent and scare our guy into taking this seriously.

  It worked.

  “Man, I need real debate prep,” Sherrod said on the drive home that day.

  “Yeah,” said Eckart.

  “I need a real team to get me ready.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You already know this.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  We set aside two full days of prep for each of the four debates. In the prep sessions, Eckart played DeWine—better than DeWine played DeWine, as it turned out. DeWine never had the one-two punches that Eckart delivered with the grace of a prizefighter.

  The first day of prep was the worst. As Sherrod put it, “Eckart kicked my ass.”

  Dennis was aggressive and relentless, and on issue after issue, Sherrod fumbled. Then he stumbled. Then we got to watch it all on videotape.

  “Ohhhh,” Sherrod groaned as everyone else in the room laughed. “I look awful.”

  It was a place to start, and Tom O’Donnell made the ground rules clear. When Sherrod took a bathroom break, Tom lectured us like the patriarch of an unruly brood.

  “Look,” he growled in his strong Brooklyn accent as he laid eyes on each and every one of us. “I don’t want everyone beating him up. Dennis just did that, and that’s his job. (Dennis beamed.) Now we have to help him get better, and we’re not going to do that if everyone starts showing off and criticizing every little thing about him.”

  Sherrod and I both had a real soft spot for grumpy Tom. My crush began when we interviewed him with his colleagues, David Doak and Mattis Goldman, for the consulting job back in the fall of 2005. I will never forget his answer when we asked why he wanted to work for Sherrod: “I’ve been waiting a long time for a candidate to fight, to really fight, for what I believe in,” he said, his face folded into one long scowl. “Sherrod is on the right side, and I want the right side to win for a change.”

  O’Donnell later told me that he’d never seen a candidate more willing to improve than Sherrod. While I winced at all the criticism, Sherrod took notes. When he didn’t feel comfortable with an answer, he’d practice until he felt he knew the material cold. He drew stick figures at the top of his notes to remind himself to stand up straight during the debates. And he learned how to turn his anger at predictable jabs from DeWine into opportunities to nail him.

  DeWine, for example, loved to describe Sherrod as being “on the fringe of his own party.”

  “Respond, pivot, and deck ’im,” O’Donnell yelled.

  “Are you calling workers fringe?” Sherrod said in the last debate prep before Meet the Press. “Are the majority of Americans who oppose the Iraq War on the fringe? Are our senior citizens who want affordable drugs on the fringe?”

  “There you go!” O’Donnell said. “Don’t you dare let him get away with that.”

  The women in the room helped to give Sherrod balance. When the topic of school violence came up, the men immediately grilled him on what he would do to prevent future shootings. Liz Farrar, from Sherrod’s D.C. office, politely interrupted.

  “Shouldn’t his first comment be to express sympathy for the families whose children have been wounded and killed?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Sure, absolutely.”

  “Well, yeah, that goes without saying.”

  Throughout debate prep, we encouraged Sherrod to start with broad points, then zoom in on specifics. O’Donnell said that, unlike a lot of candidates, Sherrod really understood policy. He couldn’t tell you how to play a CD or imitate the robot on Lost in Space, but he could give you a rundown of Will and Ariel Durant’s entire History of Civilization because he’d read all eleven volumes. He loved talking about the lessons of history, and his memory—and enthusiasm—for numbers, which started when he was a young boy calculating batting averages of Cleveland Indians, had served him well throughout his career.

  As the hours progressed, Sherrod got better and better. At the end of Day Two in debate prep, I turned to him and said, “You’re going to have fun on Meet the Press tomorrow.”

  Dennis nodded. “As the Pentagon would say, it’s a target-rich environment.”

  And Sherrod was ready to take aim.

  nineteen

  Bananajuana

  AS SOON AS THE CAMERA LIGHTS DIMMED ON THE SET OF MEET THE Press, Sherrod turned to me and said, “I didn’t want it to end.”

  His debate with Mike DeWine would set the tone for the rest of the campaign. In less than an hour on that Sunday morning of October 1, 2006, Sherrod proved he was more than up to the challenge of being a United States senator. And others took notice. Potential donors who’d ignored his calls for weeks were suddenly sending checks. Some reporters and columnists started writing about how, short of an October surprise, Sherrod looked unbeatable. And it wasn’t long before the Republican National Committee virtually abandoned Mike DeWine.

  Most reporters declared all the debates to be slugfests that nobody won. We didn’t agree, but we didn’t waste any energy lobbying, either. What mattered was how Sherrod felt after the debates, and he was flying high after Meet the Press.

  It was becoming clear to even the most jaded reporters that Sherrod’s race was gaining momentum. Sometimes, they actually acknowledged it, such as in Dayton, which was the site of the second televised debate.

  As Sherrod made his way down the hall and into the studio, Joanna, Dennis, and I hummed the theme song from Rocky. Dennis jogged behind Sherrod, rubbing his shoulders like a trainer, and I j
ogged backward in front of him, throwing imaginary punches to warm up our prizefighter. Sherrod was laughing, as were most of the journalists around us.

  “Okay, I shouldn’t tell you this,” one of them said, pointing toward the room where DeWine was getting ready. “But the mood down there is real different from the mood right here.”

  The crowds were another indication that Sherrod was pulling ahead. Sherrod Brown supporters easily outnumbered DeWine supporters two to one at the third debate in Toledo, and the DeWine people were getting desperate. During that debate, Sherrod stopped midsentence and asked his supporters not to boo and hiss as DeWine’s supporters in the audience did every time Sherrod spoke. That only made the DeWine people jeer louder.

  In the last two weeks of the campaign, Sherrod got another boost. His dear friend John Kleshinski joined us on the trail. This was Jack Dover’s idea, and someday we’ll stop thanking him. Sherrod had warned me that the last two weeks of any campaign will drive even the most decent person to make a deal with the devil if only he’ll promise to bring it all to an end. By then, you’ve eaten so much bad food and had so little sleep even your earlobes are bloated. Your pets sniff you as if they’ve never seen you in their entire lives. And everywhere you go, you’re accosted, either by people who wear your opponent’s T-shirts and taunt you, or by well-wishers who wear your T-shirt and want a picture with you, which you readily agree to because they’ve often waited two hours or more just to see you.

  John was the perfect antidote to all of this. Where we saw another grinding sixteen-hour day, he saw one long party. Every morning, he’d show up at our home, clap his hands, and say, “Okay! Everybody ready? Let’s go campaign!” I’d pour him a strong cup of my French roast coffee and off we’d go, our new driver, Nick Watt, leading the way.

  “Hey, guys, can you believe this?” John said over and over as we traveled one last time through southern Ohio, then back through central Ohio on our way to Cleveland. “Can you believe we get to do this?”