Joanna, our intrepid communications director, stepped up when they tried to photograph Sherrod and me voting in plain sight.
“Hey, sorry, but the voting booth is still private, even if there isn’t any, well, booth,” she said, shooing them off to a safe distance. I heard Sherrod talking to someone and looked up to find my husband, seized by the spirit of Gandhi, shaking the hand of our neighbor with the DeWine sign in his yard. Unable at that moment to be the change I wanted to see in the world, I looked back down and kept voting.
We later learned that out of seven hundred or so votes cast in our Republican precinct, Sherrod won by fifty. I sleep a little better knowing that.
Soon after voting, we parted with our daughters. Liz went to work the phone banks at one of our campaign headquarters while Caitlin canvassed neighborhoods in the rain with our driver, Nick Watt. Emily was still in Columbus and Mike was in Marion, both of them coordinating the get-out-the-vote efforts. Andy and Stina canvassed in Columbus. All of our children would later join us at our hotel.
After visiting two more polling places, Sherrod and I arrived around 1 P.M. at our hotel room at the Crowne Plaza in downtown Cleveland. The Crowne was directly across from Cleveland Public Hall, where Sherrod’s victory party was scheduled to take place later in the evening. We never let ourselves call it anything other than that. Dennis Eckart headed up the planning.
“You’re going to love it,” he kept saying throughout the weekend, without ever providing any details. When we asked our scheduler, Shana Johnson, she just repeated his assurance. “Really,” she said, “you’re going to love it.”
We had decided just before the weekend not to join the coordinated campaign celebration in Columbus, the state capital, because the Ohio Democratic Party had not reserved a big enough space to accommodate all who wanted to attend. We didn’t want so many volunteers and contributors closed out after a long year of such hard work. Besides, we lived in northeastern Ohio, where Sherrod had been a congressman for fourteen years and I had worked nearly as many years at The Plain Dealer. If we held the party in Cleveland, supporters throughout the northern part of the state—many of them union members who’d worked on Sherrod’s campaigns for more than a decade—could join in the celebration.
Our press secretary, Ben LaBolt, initially balked at the switch, insisting the media would abandon us for the party in central Ohio. After a few calls to the press, though, he laughed at his own anxiety.
“They’ll be here,” he said, beaming. “Media coverage definitely won’t be a problem.”
We left the chaotic hotel lobby for our suite on the twenty-second floor. The campaign staff reserved a suite, which had two bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a living and dining area, as well as three televisions. No matter how many people joined us in the next few hours, we would have one bedroom reserved just for us. For two whole hours, we had the place to ourselves before dozens of family members, staff, and volunteers—not to mention a number of people we’d never seen before—found their way to our room.
Shana had ordered some food for us, and both of us started laughing when we spotted a dish of cold baked potatoes piled amid the cheese and crackers. Sherrod always asked me to bake extra whenever I made them for dinner, so that he could bring the leftovers on the campaign trail the next day. I’m afraid I’ve never developed a taste for the cold spuds, but Sherrod eats them like apples—much to the amusement of staff members. Apparently Shana thought he preferred his potatoes like this, and so there they were: a small mountain of stone-cold tubers.
I looked out at the overcast skies and spotted the sole wind turbine—I mistakenly called it a windmill until someone corrected me—spinning at Cleveland’s Science Center. So many times Sherrod had mentioned the wind turbine in speeches as a promise of what could come to Ohio if only we focused on creating alternative energy solutions. It was a sign of the future, and I found it oddly reassuring as I watched it twirl.
Public Hall, surrounded by quiet streets, looked lifeless and abandoned. That would change, and soon. In less than three hours, the polls would close and the crowd of activists, staff, and political junkies would convene in the cavernous auditorium. Sherrod expected the networks to start calling the race a half-hour or so later.
“By eight o’clock,” he said. “They’ll know it by then, unless it’s close—and it’s not going to be close.”
The day before, Sherrod and I had brainstormed the beginning of his victory speech. We knew that at best he had maybe two minutes to capture the attention of the media, and I encouraged him not to start with a litany of the people he wanted to thank. Politicians do that all the time, and even the objects of their gratitude start to swoon with boredom around the fourteenth name.
First, we tried a little humor. The Toledo Blade was the only major Ohio paper to endorse Sherrod, so we toyed with this beginning:
To the editorial boards of the Akron Beacon Journal, The Cincinnati Post, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Dayton Daily News, The Columbus Dispatch, the Canton Repository, the Youngstown Vindicator and The Plain Dealer: I gratefully accept this endorsement from the hardworking men and women of Ohio.
When we ran it past Joanna, she laughed like crazy. Oh, ho, ho, ain’t we funny?
Then she shook her head.
“Okay, I know you guys are having a little fun, letting off a little steam, but do we really want this to be our message on election night?”
Whenever Joanna started talking about “we,” the real “we” knew that we’d just found ourselves a fish that couldn’t be more dead in the water.
Sherrod had scribbled some notes, but four hours before the polls closed, he had hovered but not landed. He pulled off his suit and tie and changed into a pair of his rattiest sweats in the time it took me to kick off my shoes.
“I need to write my speech,” he said, frowning as he sat down at the large wooden dining table. “I still don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“Yes, you do,” I said, grabbing the notes he’d read to me a little earlier. “And it’s not this.”
He looked at me and sighed.
“Think about what this means,” I said, “to you, to Ohio—and to the country.”
“Was that supposed to make me feel less nervous?”
I put down my own notebook and sat across from him at the table.
“Tell me a story,” I said, and that was all I had to say.
Less than thirty minutes later, Sherrod knew exactly what he wanted to say to the people of Ohio.
OUR SUITE BEGAN TO FILL SHORTLY AFTER 5 P.M. JOANNA, SHANA, Wendy, and John Kleshinski were the first to show up, mainly to go over last-minute details. Soon after that, Liz and Caitlin arrived, followed by my sisters, Leslie and Toni, who had driven together from our hometown of Ashtabula, about an hour east of Cleveland. I really wanted them with me on Election Night, and to my delight they immediately agreed. My brother, Chuck, joked that while he was a Republican willing to vote for Sherrod, he had to draw the line at sharing a stage with the guy who took on the pharmaceutical companies—one of which is his employer.
Les and Toni hugged me, then pulled me aside.
“We have something for you,” Les said.
“We knew Dad would want you to have it,” Toni added.
When they pulled it out of the bag, I recognized it immediately: Dad’s beloved old suede jacket, the tan one he’d worn at Sherrod’s rally in Ashtabula. It was the same jacket he had on in the last photo I took of him, the picture that popped up on the television screen during my interview on the Today show only four days after he had died. That same photo was in a frame in our center hallway, and I never walked past it without silently saying, “Hi, Dad.”
I held up the jacket and noticed that his “Sherrod Brown” sticker was still over the left pocket.
I barely got out the words “Thank you,” then walked into a nearby bathroom and closed the door. I pulled on Dad’s jacket, sat on the counter, and had a good cry.
Soon
after that, Jackie and Kate showed up, and I nearly teared up again at the sight of our two close friends. Jackie took one look at me and said, “Oh, dolly, can you believe it? You’re almost there.” She hardly ever left my side throughout the rest of the evening.
By 7 P.M. or so the place was buzzing. All of our kids and Sherrod’s family had arrived. I watched as Emily and Elizabeth, veterans of so many campaigns, hovered around their dad like butterflies. Repeatedly they patted his back, whispered in his ear, and leaned on his shoulder. They had waited a long time for this night, this victory.
John Ryan called on my cell phone to let us know that a close friend of Mike DeWine’s had called Ryan and asked for Sherrod’s private cell phone number.
“Why?” I asked.
To his credit, Ryan pretended I hadn’t just asked one of the more stupid questions of the campaign.
“Well, probably so that Mike can call him,” he said.
Silence.
And then the heavens opened up and the choir began to sing.
“Oh, oh, right,” I said, finally catching on. “So that he can concede.”
“Right.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“You gave him the number?”
“Yeah,” said Ryan, who was really earning overtime with this call. “I gave it to him, but maybe you should hold on to Sherrod’s phone to make sure he gets the call.”
“Which phone? One of the BlackBerries, or the cell phone?”
“The cell phone. I figured you could fit that one in your pocket.”
That was John Ryan, always thinking of the candidate’s wife, even when she wasn’t thinking at all.
I shared Ryan’s news with Sherrod, who nodded silently and handed me his phone. Then we excused ourselves from the increasingly crowded part of the suite and went into our bedroom so that we could shower and change.
At about 7:40, ten minutes after the polls had closed, Sherrod and I sat down on the edge of our bed and said a prayer before rejoining the group, who were already in a celebrating mood.
As always, we faced each other and joined hands, then bowed our heads as we thanked God for getting us through this challenging year. We prayed for strength, ours and Mike DeWine’s, and then we held each other for a moment, until we heard a cheer swell up outside our bedroom door.
Sherrod looked at me quizzically. The clock on the bedside stand said it was only 7:45.
We opened the door and found Joanna standing inches away.
“Okay,” she said, smiling, “it’s premature, but CBS has just declared you the winner.” We looked up at the large-screen TV and saw the check mark under a portrait of Sherrod. We turned to each other, and as soon as I saw the tears in Sherrod’s eyes I wrapped my right arm around his neck and buried my face in his shoulder, as I so often do in our more private moments.
Then we heard it: the kachick-kachick-kachick of cameras, their lights flashing over and over.
We looked at the group of photographers crouched in front of us, then looked at Joanna, whose own eyes were on the brink of flooding.
“I forgot to tell you they were here,” she said. “Remember? They wanted to come up for a few minutes? We talked about this.”
Sherrod and I both shook our heads and started to laugh. The next day, versions of that photo—capturing us clearly overcome with emotion—ran in newspapers across the country, including The New York Times.
The Dayton Daily News’s Jessica Wehrman best described that moment, and what it meant for me, a few days later:
It was a familiar and comfortable stance for Schultz and Brown, who’ve been married two years; one Schultz knows viscerally.
Until she opened Wednesday’s paper, though, she’d never seen what that familiar pose looked like to the outside world.
It was a second when both realized that their long hours campaigning had resulted in a victory, and it was duly recorded and put on the wires for all newspapers to run in their morning editions.
And it made Schultz realize, yet again, what a different sort of marriage hers is—where a moment of victory or defeat can be captured by the cameras; where crowds press against them at campaign events, people taking pictures with cell phones; where perfect strangers recognize her and her husband.
“It wasn’t our moment,” Schultz said. “We don’t get that anymore.”
It was merely an observation of how much our lives, and our marriage, had changed.
MINUTES AFTER CBS DECLARED SHERROD THE WINNER, SENATORS Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer called Sherrod to congratulate him. Shortly after that, Hillary Clinton was on the phone.
“Tell Connie not to let anyone tell her she can’t have her career,” she said to Sherrod, who immediately repeated her advice. Several women in the suite applauded. Granted, they were my friends or relatives, but still. Shortly after that, our Jos. A. Bank salesman, Allen Roy, called. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t forget to straighten Sherrod’s tie before he gives his victory speech. The entire nation will be watching. Let’s not have them focused on the crooked tie.”
Even though DeWine’s friend had called early in the evening for Sherrod’s phone number, by 10 P.M. he apparently still hadn’t persuaded DeWine to make the call. We were waiting for even a hint of a concession. The crowd across the street was growing, but Ryan was worried we’d lose a number of them if Sherrod didn’t show up soon. Joanna fretted over losing precious television airtime before the eleven o’clock news. “Once the news starts, we lose them,” she said.
Ryan looked at his watch and gave us a rare order. “We wait until ten-thirty. If we don’t hear from DeWine by then, we’re going over to the hall and Sherrod’s going to give his speech.” Ted Strickland had already delivered his victory speech as Ohio’s next governor.
Meanwhile, we crammed around a TV set, watching as one Democrat after another captured a congressional seat. Sherrod leaned in and whispered, “This could have turned out a lot differently, baby.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed. We always knew it was a gamble, but once we made the decision, we never let ourselves look back. Until Election Night, that is, when we watched the best-case scenario play out before our eyes.
The Democratic Senate victories were starting to pile up, too. Bernie Sanders took Vermont; Bob Casey beat Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania; Amy Klobuchar won in Minnesota; Sheldon Whitehouse took the Rhode Island seat from Lincoln Chafee. Claire McCaskill’s race against incumbent Jim Talent was still too close to call, but we were confident she would win because the votes in heavily Democratic St. Louis had not yet been reported. Jon Tester of Montana and Jim Webb in Virginia, both of them locked in neck-and-neck races, were destined for all-nighters. Harold Ford in Tennessee was the only certain Democratic defeat.
As our suite grew louder, I set Sherrod’s cell phone to ring-and-vibrate and then held it in my hand throughout the evening. I had only one job that night, and I wasn’t going to screw it up. Around 10:20, Ryan pulled us aside. “I think we’d better head on over. We can’t wait forever for DeWine to call.”
It took several elevator rides to get everyone down to the lobby, and we were walking across East Sixth Street in downtown Cleveland when my hand started to vibrate. I looked in the cell phone window: The area code was from DeWine’s home county. Immediately I pulled Sherrod back to the sidewalk.
“It’s DeWine,” I said, handing him the phone. Ryan and Joanna began shushing everyone as Sherrod flipped open the phone.
“Hello?” Pause. “Mike. Thank you for calling.”
For the next few minutes, we stood silently around Sherrod as he talked with the man we’d known only as his opponent for the last thirteen months. Sherrod listened as DeWine congratulated him on running a strong race and told him, twice, “You’re going to love this job.”
“I know how hard this call is, Mike,” Sherrod said. “I had to make this kind of call to Bob Taft in 1990, and it wasn’t easy. I appreciate that you did this.”
DeWine asked Sh
errod to wait until he delivered his concession speech before he took the stage. Sherrod agreed, and we headed over to the hall to wait.
Sherrod’s colleague and cherished friend Stephanie Tubbs Jones effortlessly segued from preacher to stateswoman to stand-up comedienne. We arrived just as she was pantomiming DeWine’s lockstep with Bush to uproarious applause. As soon as the large video screen over the stage began televising DeWine’s concession speech, though, the hall grew silent. Sherrod and I watched on a small TV monitor backstage.
Against the backdrop of a large American flag, surrounded by his family, DeWine delivered a somber speech.
“In this race we fought hard,” he said. “We did everything we could do, but it just wasn’t meant to be. This was not the year. We could not win.”
He spoke for a few more minutes as his wife, Fran, stood by his side. While some on the stage were wiping away tears, she looked the way I’d hoped I would if the roles had been reversed: already poised to be the rock her husband would need. As I watched, I couldn’t help but feel I had more in common with Fran DeWine than with anyone standing around me. We are different women, as others too often had gleefully pointed out, but we both love our husbands and had stood by them through a grueling race. Nobody else really understood what we had been through, but our loyalty to our husbands also meant that those were stories we would never share with each other.
During the campaign, some reporters and columnists had predicted political death for the loser in this race, but DeWine clearly wasn’t buying that theory. He ended his speech by suggesting he would be back:
. . . And His Lovely Wife Page 24