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The Columnist Who Shut Up to Speak Out
"I'm having to rein myself in," says Connie Schultz of her role as wife to Rep. Sherrod Brown.
(By Joanna Kuebler/The Post)
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Once Brown entered the race, it was only a question of time before Schultz would quit her column. For reasons of newspaper ethics and spousal devotion -- who would make sure there were mango slices and carrots in Brown's campaign car? -- Schultz realized in February that the time had come.
This would be an adventure, right? Aren't the best adventures a bit scary?
Well, she was scared.
After she told her editors, she opened her journal and wrote in big block letters, "WHAT IS TO BECOME OF ME?"
At Home in Avon
It is a Sunday night in a largely Republican housing development in Avon, west of Cleveland, an unlikely choice for arch-liberals Schultz and Brown after their wedding. Schultz is home after two appearances for her book, a collection of columns called "Life Happens, and Other Unavoidable Truths."
Waiting for Brown, she boils a pot of water in the combination kitchen and family room where they installed a floor-to-cathedral-ceiling wall of bookshelves to accommodate their library. Apologizing for the impromptu meal, she grabs a jar of prepared tomato sauce from the cupboard and a bottle of red wine from the attached garage.
Down the hall, across from the desk where she writes, a ping-pong table is set up on the thick carpet of the living room. It was Schultz's second-anniversary present for her husband. Until he suffered a campaign trail double hernia, they played most nights when he was in Ohio.
"We're pretty wound up when we get home," Schultz explains. "We come home, we play ping-pong and we talk. Just to take his mind off it a little bit."
"It's hard. It's really hard," Brown says of running in a state that last elected a Democratic senator in 1992. He mentions the scope, the pressure. Friends say Brown, divorced for 16 years before he married Schultz, believes he has found a true campaign partner.
He told Schultz the previous night that he would not have campaigned as well or as successfully without her.
"When you said that, I was stunned," she tells him.
"You know that," he answers. "I've told you that a hundred times in a lot of different ways."
