The Columnist Who Shut Up to Speak Out
Connie Schultz Gave Up Her Platform to Jump on Her Husband's Bandwagon

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 17, 2006

CLEVELAND At a lively Democratic gathering in a nearby suburb, Senate candidate Sherrod Brown is talking up his wife to the party faithful. He says, as he always does in this part of Ohio, that the crowd probably already knows Connie Schultz as a prizewinning newspaper columnist.

As the seven-term congressman praises her "terrific sacrifice" in giving up the column in the Plain Dealer during the campaign, a spirited voice calls out from the back, "Just win, honey!"

That would be Schultz, who less than a year after winning a Pulitzer Prize tucked away her pen and pad to support her husband in the toughest race of his career -- and one of the most important, most intense, most eyeballed matches of the 2006 campaign season.

The campaign role is new to her. So, for practical purposes, is the marriage. Schultz and Brown met in 2003 when each was long divorced. Now, barely on opposite sides of 50, they are learning to be political partners amid the friction and heat of a grueling race. As friend Jackie Cassara put it, "Why don't you just put them in a centrifuge and spin vigorously?"

Brown is surrendering a safe seat in Congress after seven terms to challenge Sen. Mike DeWine, a two-term Republican incumbent with a campaign treasury that stretches from Cincinnati to Toledo. Schultz is giving up the comfort and satisfaction of her freewheeling newspaper voice.

Some days, the blessing is decidedly mixed. As she arrived to speak to a crowd of 430 retirees at United Auto Workers Local 1250, the union president made a pitch for Brown's candidacy. He then turned to her and said, "I believe he's sent his lovely wife. Connie, is it?"

"The hardest thing," she says, "is I'm always talking for my husband."

Brown, 53, is a doctor's son schooled at Yale. Schultz, 49, is a maintenance man's daughter who became her family's first college graduate. Yet with their progressive philosophy, their passion for the underdog and their gregarious flesh-pressing, there is no mistaking that they are a matched set.

There are plenty of similarities in their rhetoric, too. Schultz, for instance, has publicly accused DeWine of lying about her husband's record and "betraying the working families he was supposed to serve."

Their collective decision to challenge DeWine, a family values conservative with an agreeable public persona in a state long dominated by Republicans, is the biggest political risk of their professional lives. Brown initially said he would not run, because of family concerns.

"I was really the holdout," Schultz says. "We were in a very new marriage. I was not a political spouse. I knew how you could blow a marriage."

As they talked, and talked, she came to see that Brown needed to enter the race or forever regret it. As she puts it, "The stars had aligned, and I was going to be the big, fat moon in the way."

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."

Schultz smilingly reports that a woman had advised her to keep an eye on her man, what with the availability in Washington of so many alluring women-not-his-wife. Brown sees many good reasons not to stray, not least Schultz's megaphone -- and her proven willingness to use it.

"I have already said to people," Brown says, "if I ever did anything, she wouldn't just cut my [testicles] off. She'd write about it."

Smitten by Her Words

The citation with Schultz's Pulitzer for commentary praised "her pungent columns that provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged."

Two weeks after she began writing her column in October 2002, she received an e-mail from one "Sherrod Brown, Lorain, Ohio." It read: "Where did the Plain Dealer find you? You are a breath of fresh air; your writing reminds me of that of Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite living writers."

Brown read Schultz's first column aloud at the Thanksgiving dinner table. It was about her father, for 36 years an electric company worker. It began, "I want Dad's lunch pail."

"To Dad, it's a daily reminder of the job he hated," wrote Schultz. "To me, it is an enduring symbol of the promise he made to his four young children. 'You kids are never going to carry one of these to work,' he'd tell us, over and over. 'You kids are going to college.' "

Schultz is a mother of two who graduated from Kent State and quit law school after two years. She writes about coat-check attendants whose tips are siphoned by management. She urges respect for valet parkers and better health care for the uninsured. She quotes her mother's admonition: "Don't marry him till you see how he treats the waitress."

She wrote in one column that on the Sunday after Ohio voters banned same-sex marriage, straight members of her congregation wept as more than 50 gay worshipers stood to show they had been affected by the legislation.

"They didn't look angry or defiant," she wrote. "They looked abandoned."

Brown is a self-described battler for the little guy. First elected to the Ohio House at 21, he has been a politician ever since. He fought fiercely against NAFTA and voted against the Iraq war resolution and the Patriot Act. He spotted the makings of a soul mate in Schultz's politics and her tolerant Christian faith -- she belongs to the United Church of Christ; he is Lutheran.

Daughters Emily and Liz saw it right away.

"He would read us her columns over the phone," says Emily, 25, a union organizer on leave to work in the campaign. "Liz and I were, 'Clearly, you should just ask this woman out, Dad.' "

He did and they met for dinner on New Year's Day 2003.

"Within two seconds," says Emily, "they were in love."

Precisely 10 months 26 days later, Schultz told her readers, they married.

'Mrs. Brown' She's Not

Plain Dealer readers know much about the contours of Schultz's heart. She wrote of her nervousness, at age 45, about their first date. She told about Brown becoming friends with her cat, and her inaugural trip to buy manure for his tomato vines. Also, their pedometer competition, their "all day long" e-mail exchanges and the night he proposed.

"Falling in love when you're knee-deep in middle age takes some getting used to," Schultz wrote. "For one thing, you feel mighty silly giggling all the time, especially in front of your grown kids."

The character and the cadence of her columns infuse her performance on the hustings. She tells of campaign encounters and describes her working-class roots in Ashtabula, Ohio, where, as she puts it, a couple of nobodies wore themselves out so their children could become somebodies.

But her talk turns tough when she shifts to Republican criticism of her husband.

"We're going to fight back," she told the UAW crowd. "You respond, you pivot, and you deck 'em."

"Connie has never known the luxury of an unexpressed thought. It's into her head and out of her mouth very quickly," says Cassara, a Cleveland Realtor and the close friend described by Schultz as "my sanity in this race."

Total strangers suddenly have expectations, from how she should wear her hair to how she should gaze upon her husband as he speaks. People regularly ask when she will change her name to Mrs. Brown. Answer: She won't.

"You know what the difference is now?" Schultz asks one morning over coffee. "I'm having to rein myself in. I'm less myself."

This is Brown's race, after all, and he must remain the focus.

"When somebody asks a question, I feel I can't immediately answer. I have to say, 'Sherrod's particularly outspoken about this,' " Schultz says. "Thank God we agree on almost everything. If we didn't, I don't know how I'd do this."

Twice, people have pasted DeWine stickers over the bumper sticker on her car, the one that reads, "Well-behaved women rarely make history."

"A little hostility out there?" she asks in mock innocence.

Then there was her parking lot encounter with the man who pointed to the "Brown for Senate" sticker on her car and said, "I wouldn't be caught dead with that guy's bumper sticker." He told her it was not too late to repent, she remembers.

"It really is too late," Schultz replied.

"Why?"

"I married the guy."

The Opponent's Wife

Fran DeWine married her guy, too, 39 years ago. The wedding was two weeks after her 20th birthday, because she believed teenage marriages were doomed. Even then, she had already dated Mike DeWine for longer than Schultz and Brown have known each other.

She takes a softer approach than Schultz when promoting her husband's candidacy. Through 30 years of political life since DeWine won his first race for Green County prosecutor, Fran DeWine says she has overcome an initial shyness. She hands out her trademark 24-page cookbook, paid for by the Ohio GOP, and frequently mentions her eight children and nine grandchildren.

"First of all, I talk about Mike and I, knowing him since we started first grade together," DeWine says by telephone from Northern Virginia as she bakes banana bread for her youngest daughter's cross-country meet.

"I don't go into the details he goes into, but I like to tell what he spends his time doing," says DeWine. She talks of her husband's work on the Senate Intelligence Committee, his role on children's issues and his ability to deliver money to Ohio. "He's my best friend and I help him and we work together, but there is no role, 'Political Spouse.' I think everyone has to decide for themselves."

DeWine would not discuss Schultz's approach or her campaign trail commentary.

"I try not to know," DeWine says. "I want to go ahead and lead my life and I don't want to worry about that."

Schultz, meanwhile, is saying of Mike DeWine at a fundraiser, "Forget that he's lying about Sherrod's record; he's trafficking in a national tragedy for political gain." She is referring to an advertisement, later pulled, that included a doctored photograph: The producers had added more smoke to the burning World Trade Center.

The DeWine campaign stands by its effort to portray Brown as too liberal for Ohio, unable to work with Republicans and unwilling to take essential steps against terrorism.

At the fundraiser, put together by supporters calling themselves Brown-Nosers, Schultz is billed as the star. The first 20 people donating at least $300 are promised a signed copy of her book.

When Schultz begins to speak, she announces a surprise guest, one Sherrod Brown, who has flown in from Washington. As she steps back and he steps up, someone calls out, "We want Connie!"

Brown, who cried when he learned Schultz had won the Pulitzer and sometimes refers to her in e-mails as PPWCS, says a November win would bring a January trifecta: Ohio Democrats in the Senate and the governor's mansion, and Schultz's column back in the Plain Dealer.

"So many people, especially women, are really moved by what she writes about," said supporter Brittany O'Connor, who brought her mother to hear Schultz speak. "I wonder if the Plain Dealer will let her."

Hoping to Return

"It does make me uneasy," says Plain Dealer Editor Douglas Clifton. "I'm kind of old-school when it comes to drawing the line between what a reporter can and can't say or do in political campaigns."

After meeting and marrying Brown, Schultz avoided writing about issues he pushed in Congress. But she and Clifton saw that a statewide race would be trickier to navigate.

"I still want to write about what's on my mind, but that is becoming increasingly difficult," Schultz wrote in her final column. "Each passing week brings more limitations on my choice of topics because there is a concern that some will accuse me of using my column to stump for my husband."

As a woman and a feminist, she found the idea that she was "merely parroting" her husband both amusing and offensive, she wrote in that last column. But she was mindful of the appearance of a conflict of interest, as well as problems her presence might cause for colleagues covering the race.

Schultz expects to return. Clifton recently assured her that he wants her back, aware that some readers will view her work through the prism of her campaign efforts.

"In the end," Clifton says, "I have every confidence in her integrity."

Three former journalists who now spend time considering ethical quandaries say the potential conflict is made manageable by the fact that Schultz is campaigning for her husband -- turning down requests from other candidates -- and that she is an opinion writer, not a beat reporter.

"I would be more tolerant of a spouse campaigning for a wife or husband," says former ABC News reporter Bob Zelnick, who teaches journalism ethics at Boston University. He adds, however, that Schultz would be "better advised to be a little bit less sharp and pointed in her attacks on her husband's opponents."

* * *

There are 21 days to go in the campaign. As the pace quickens and the pitch of television commercials grows sharper, most polls show Brown ahead of DeWine in a race professionals expect to remain close.

Schultz crisscrosses the state, keeping in touch with Brown via BlackBerry and cellphone, grabbing catnaps on long drives to Avon. Every day, she laments columns unwritten. But Schultz is taking notes for a campaign memoir. She will call it "And His Lovely Wife."