He was, as he said, “one happy puppy.”
In Gallipolis: “Wow, how ’bout that crowd!”
In Chillicothe: “Did you see all those homemade signs?”
In Wapakoneta: “My God, this is history in the making!”
John had been a diabetic since he was thirteen, and his wife, Emily, worried about him constantly. She had agreed to his coming to Ohio as long as he promised to call her regularly. So four, five, six, eight times a day, he’d dial his cell phone and give her updates on the trail from the backseat of our Pacifica. “Em, I’m not kidding,” I heard him say at one point, “this is one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done.”
After our third day of campaigning with John, Sherrod turned to me and said, “John sure makes it a lot of fun, doesn’t he?”
He made it easier, too, and I told John that as he and I were standing in the back of the room at a Democratic Party dinner in Lima.
“His step is lighter because you’re here, John.”
He looked at me and smiled gently. “You think so? Really?”
“I really do.”
“Well, let me tell you something, Connie. He could not have done this without you. He knows it, we all know it. I’ve known Sherrod for thirty years, and he’s a different man because of you.”
Now I was the one tearing up. I gave him a big hug, and then we congratulated each other for not having to sit at the head table like Sherrod. When Sherrod got up to speak, John and I gave him our full attention—even when he started talking yet again about his canary pin.
“He sure likes that pin,” John whispered.
“Mm-hmm.”
A couple of times in those last two weeks we stayed in a hotel, and on one of those nights a housekeeper popped in on John to ask if he wanted his bedclothes turned down.
“No, I can do that myself,” he said, handing her a twenty-dollar tip. She insisted that she could not take that money without doing something for him.
“Okay,” he said. “Would you say a prayer for me?”
She nodded, and asked his name. When he told her, she smiled.
“I will pray for you, John.”
“Isn’t that the nicest thing?” he said the next morning, recounting the story. “Who can’t use an extra prayer?”
AS OCTOBER MARCHED ON, TWO OF SHERROD’S FELLOW OHIOANS in Congress, Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Tim Ryan, started stumping for Sherrod throughout their districts—and beyond. A lot of Democratic heavy hitters had come to Ohio to help, too. Senators Hillary Clinton, Dick Durbin, Barack Obama, Tom Harkin, Barbara Boxer, Blanche Lincoln, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid and former senators Max Cleland and John Edwards all came to Ohio for fundraisers and rallies. So did former president Bill Clinton, Congresswoman Linda Sanchez, and political pundit James Carville. John Kerry raised more than $100,000 through two e-mails sent to supporters around the country, and Senator Dianne Feinstein raised nearly that same amount for Sherrod at a single fundraiser in her home.
Al Franken drew a huge crowd at Ohio State for Sherrod. Actor Adam Brody of the TV show The OC volunteered for Sherrod, as did Luke Perry, who starred on Beverly Hills 90210. Brody said he had been following various candidates’ races on the Web and chose Sherrod’s. Wherever the slight, polite young actor went, girls screamed and swooned.
Perry had a more personal tie to Ohio. He was born in Sherrod’s hometown of Mansfield, and Sherrod’s dad, Dr. Charles Brown, delivered him. Doc Brown was his family physician for many years, and Sherrod hung on Luke’s every story about his father, who had died in February 2000.
Luke pointed to the scar on his forehead and told Sherrod, “That’s where my brother stuck an arrow in my head. Your father pulled it out for me. He was always having to rescue me from something.”
We also enjoyed swapping stories with Luke about others’ misperceptions of Ohioans. Whenever Sherrod and I went to California for fundraisers, inevitably someone would comment on how young and energetic we seemed. “It’s like they were expecting Aunt Bee and Otis from Mayberry,” I told Luke.
“I know what you mean,” he said, grinning. “Every time someone hears I’m from Ohio, they expect me to pull out a banjo and start playing.”
Singer Carole King, a longtime friend of Sherrod’s, came to Ohio for several days. She insisted that in addition to playing a fundraising concert, she would campaign for Sherrod in small rural communities. And that’s exactly what she did, drawing crowds and headlines everywhere she went. My favorite moment with Carole, though, was during her concert for Sherrod in Cincinnati. We were sitting in the balcony, within view of the three hundred or so attending. When she sang “You’ve Got a Friend,” she asked everyone to sing along. The lights went up, and she pointed right at Sherrod. The entire crowd turned to face him as they sang the chorus, assuring Sherrod that he was not alone.
J. D. Souther and Jackson Browne came, too, for a fundraiser for the Ohio Democratic Party. When Jackson performed “I Am a Patriot,” many of those in the room wiped their eyes. It had been a long few years, full of right-wing attacks on our family values and our patriotism, and it felt so good to sing along as the nighttime breezes washed over us.
That was the fun stuff, but we squeezed it in around a full schedule of campaigning and fundraising. Sherrod was still doing a minimum of four radio interviews every weekday morning before 7:00, and then hitting the road most days by 8 A.M. for as many public appearances as possible in front of large groups. Whenever he was in the car or between meetings, and before events started, he continued to make fundraising calls. That goal—a minimum of two hundred calls a week—did not change until the last week of the campaign.
What did change was my schedule. John Ryan had called me during the last week in September with a specific request.
“This is countdown time,” he said. “This is when Sherrod will be monitored closely at every single public event in the hopes that he’ll screw up and one of the Republican trackers or a reporter can catch the mistake.”
“I thought we’d been worried about that for months,” I said.
“Well, yeah, we were, but back then we always figured we’d have the time to recover. Now, he makes a mistake, we don’t have enough time to turn it around.”
I was reminded of a story one of our consultants told us early in the campaign. Right after the 1972 presidential race, the consultant was dining with a friend in a Washington restaurant. The friend pointed to a man sitting nearby and said, “There’s the person who made Edmund Muskie cry.”
“That’s William Loeb, the newspaper editor?”
“No,” his friend replied. “His scheduler.”
Loeb’s newspaper had attacked the character of Muskie’s wife. Muskie launched an emotional defense of her right outside the newspaper’s office during a snowstorm. Reporters later said Muskie had cried during his speech. Muskie insisted that snowflakes had melted on his face, but the damage was done.
Our consultant’s friend said Muskie broke down because he was exhausted from his unrelenting schedule.
That sort of story was why I worried about Sherrod throughout the campaign, and it was why I immediately responded to John Ryan.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.
“I want you to be with Sherrod on the road as much as possible.”
“What about things I’m already scheduled to attend?”
“I always told Shana to tell anyone requesting you in October that your schedule could change.”
“And now it has?”
“Yeah. He does better when you’re with him, Connie. He laughs more, he relaxes more, he’s more confident. You know it, and so does he. I think that’s where we need you most.”
Shana cleared my calendar of all but the bigger events where I would be speaking to large, nonpartisan crowds. An AARP luncheon stayed on the schedule; so did a senior citizens group of about two hundred in Strongsville. I also kept my commitment to speak at a house party in Knox County after the organizers
won a contest sponsored by the campaign. Whoever could guarantee the largest crowd got—ta-dah—me. Sherrod and I were always reunited as soon as possible, and staff often joked that Sherrod was quick to complain if he felt we were apart too long.
On the evening of October 15, The New York Times broke the story that the GOP was pulling out of Ohio.
Adam Nagourney’s story, posted on the Times’s website and then on the newspaper’s front page the following day, gave us all we needed to know in the first sentence:
Senior Republican leaders have concluded that Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio, a pivotal state in this year’s fierce midterm election battles, is likely to be heading for defeat and are moving to reduce financial support of his race and divert party money to other embattled Republican senators, party officials said.
DeWine, and RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, quickly scrambled to refute the claim, but the damage was done. From that moment on, reporters started covering the DeWine campaign as if it were the band on the Titanic.
Sherrod sent this e-mail to his campaign, titled “To the Best Campaign Staff in the History of the World”:
The news in Monday’s New York Times is incredible. All of us need to step back, take a breath, and realize what has happened: We are running against a two-term incumbent who is popular among the elite and the opinion-makers in Ohio—an incumbent who has showered so many with tax money, who outspent us on television this summer by a two-to-one margin, who has savaged us as anti-patriotic and tax-and-spend liberals (not to mention “Far Out Brown”—my favorite).
Yet the Republican National Committee has made the decision to leave our state.
This is all about what YOU have done. You have out-organized them, out-fundraised them, out-worked them. You have hit back every time he has hit—and always harder and smarter and with way better research…. You have out-scheduled them. You have beat them on the Internet and on the ground. You have beat them with fundraising and with free media. You have—I actually heard about this—shown up at his press conferences and, while acting courteously, stolen the spotlight or at least dimmed his.
You have, in a nutshell, run the most amazing campaign in the country. And John Ryan has been a superstar.
But—while I rarely quote any Yankee [Sherrod’s an ardent Cleveland Indians fan]—it ain’t over till it’s over.
We have to be even better in the next 23 days. We have to continue to be aggressive and smart. We have to raise more money and continue to work for earned media. We have to organize even better than we have already.
The bigger our margin—and we haven’t even won yet, so get that out of your mind—the bigger our margin, the more down-the-ballot races we win. The bigger our margin, the stronger national message we send that an unapologetic progressive—who cares about the poor and the middle class, who cares about social justice, who cares about globalization—can win anywhere.
Remember that David Brooks of The New York Times said that this was the most important political race in the country. We need to show him and everyone else watching that this is also the best campaign in the country. So far, it has been; that’s why Karl Rove pulled the plug. We need to continue—only better—for the next 23 days.
Thank you; Connie and I are so proud of ALL of you.
Sherrod
IN OCTOBER, ALL THE OHIO NEWSPAPERS’ EDITORIAL BOARDS announced their endorsements. Of all the major daily newspapers, Sherrod got only one endorsement—from the Toledo Blade. Both Cincinnati papers, the Dayton Daily News, The Columbus Dispatch, the Canton Repository, the Youngstown Vindicator, the Akron Beacon Journal, and even The Plain Dealer endorsed Mike DeWine. We found out about that last one just as we were leaving for dinner on Sweetest Day, which we normally never celebrated, but we were grateful for the excuse to spend a few hours alone. I was signing off my computer when I noticed the e-mail from a Plain Dealer colleague. I read it, and my heart sank. I’d always known this would happen, but it still felt awful.
Sherrod walked up just as my computer screen went dark, but he could tell by the look on my face that something was wrong.
“The Plain Dealer is endorsing DeWine tomorrow.”
Sherrod looked at me, gave me a hug. “Of course they are. Let’s go eat.”
What we didn’t know that evening was that Plain Dealer columnist Dick Feagler, a Cleveland treasure, would counter the Plain Dealer editorial with his own endorsement in the same issue titled “I’m for Sherrod Brown.” If I had to choose between the readership of the editorial page and that of the popular Feagler, it wasn’t even a contest.
That night at dinner, Sherrod gave me a new pack of Moleskine notebooks, which is what I used to take notes during the campaign, and after our meal the waitress delivered a bouquet of fall flowers to our table. Immediately, I was a blubbering fool.
“Happy Sweetest Day, baby,” he said, clearly pleased with himself.
We pulled on our coats and started to leave, but another couple stopped us. The woman smiled at Sherrod. “I was going to vote for you anyway,” she said. “But seeing what you just did for your wife seals the deal.”
Sherrod threw me a sheepish grin. “I swear,” he said as we walked to our car, “I swear, I swear, I didn’t mean for that to happen.” I just laughed and buried my face in those flowers, grateful that the campaign was almost over.
The newspaper endorsements had an interesting effect on the campaign trail. Naturally, Sherrod’s supporters were angry, but a lot of reporters talked to me about them, too. A few said it was making their job harder, because most readers don’t know there is a difference between the editorial board that endorses candidates and the reporters who work hard to stay neutral. They were getting hammered by readers who now accused them of bias. One photographer was so upset with his paper’s DeWine endorsement that he slapped one of Sherrod’s stickers on his jacket at an event he was assigned to cover.
Long before I knew Sherrod, I thought newspapers should not endorse candidates. Unlike editorial writers, reporters are out on the trail, working long and hard to cover these races fairly, and they often feel undermined when their own newspapers come out at the last minute favoring one candidate over another. Even more troubling, most readers don’t know that some editorial endorsements don’t even reflect the vote of their board. Sources later told us that three editorial boards had voted to endorse Sherrod but were overruled by their newspapers’ owners. That was never disclosed to readers, which is disingenuous, if not unethical. I wish more newspapers would adopt the policy of Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, when it comes to endorsements. In all the major races, his editorial board abstains, trusting the voters to make up their own minds.
Sherrod assured me the editorial boards were out of touch with Ohio’s voters. In just a few days, we would find out just how out of touch they really were.
SHERROD’S FINAL DEBATE WAS SCHEDULED FOR FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, in Cleveland. Dennis Eckart had negotiated the debate dates and venues with the DeWine camp, and we were surprised—and thrilled—that DeWine agreed to do the last one in Cleveland, our home base.
By then, the RNC had pulled its money from DeWine’s race, and his attack ads had reached a new low, including an accusation that Sherrod had promoted an unnamed employee who dealt drugs out of his secretary of state office more than twenty years ago. DeWine refused to name this employee, and Sherrod had no idea who he could be talking about. Several newspapers deplored DeWine’s tactics as unfair and desperate, but he refused to pull the ads.
Before the debate, my friend Meg Driscoll, who worked in the flower department at Heinen’s grocery store near our home, sent an e-mail she hoped I would forward to Sherrod. I first met Meg when she came up to me to thank me for advocating for hourly workers in my column. She had watched the Toledo debate on television and wanted to pursue one of the questions a reporter had asked DeWine:
The reporter asked what DeWine did with the $73,000 he got in tax cuts over five years. That comes out to $14,600 per year. Tha
t is more than people working at 40 hours make at minimum wage, per year. Probably they don’t get health coverage and many don’t get the 40 hours, but rather just under that so they are considered part time. I am furious that he insults our intelligence. That we working people making even more than minimum wage would be [placated] by a mere $500 to $2,000 while he is raking in such profit and voting against people working so hard for so little. I can’t tell you how this cut to the quick in me. So, I am writing to you in hopes that you will pass this response from a voter on to Sherrod.
Sherrod printed a copy of Meg’s e-mail to take with him to the debate. “I don’t know if I’ll use it, but I don’t ever want to forget it,” he said.
Sherrod woke up early for the final debate, which was sponsored by the City Club of Cleveland. A record crowd—more than eleven hundred—was expected, so the City Club had moved the debate from its usual venue to the ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel on Cleveland’s Public Square.
Make-up artist Kylee Cook, who was practically family now after dabbing our cheeks and noses for television appearances all over the state of Ohio, showed up at our home around ten that morning. The debate would be telecast, and we wanted to make sure Sherrod didn’t look pale under the hot lights. He was in his usual good temper about this, grumbling the entire time she patted him with pancake, but Kylee cheerfully assured him that this was the price of fame.
Dennis joined us and our driver, Nick Watt, for the half-hour trip to downtown Cleveland. Charlie Anderson, a retired Iraq War veteran and veterans liaison for Sherrod’s campaign, had told us that a traveling antiwar exhibit, “Eyes Wide Open,” would be set up across the street from the hotel. Charlie knew we’d want to stop there.
Sherrod and I had opposed the war from the beginning. By our first date, in January 2003, Sherrod had already voted against the war, and I was regularly writing columns against it. I had first written about the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit in 2004, when more than eight hundred pairs of empty military boots filled row after row on a grassy hill in Cleveland Heights to represent the American troops who had died in Iraq. Now, in October 2006, the exhibit, which was sponsored by the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee, displayed more than three thousand pairs of boots, and included rows of children’s shoes to represent the tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens who had died. Throughout the campaign, the war was always there, always hovering, and by the day of Sherrod’s final debate, Ohio ranked fifth in the number of troops killed.
. . . And His Lovely Wife Page 22