. . . And His Lovely Wife (6 page)

Gaylee has known me for nearly thirty years, and she is a woman used to being in charge. When I was about to separate from my first husband, she walked through my house with a pad of stickers to mark everything she thought I should take with me. When she found out I was dating Sherrod, she Googled him and gave me a full report.

She married young, was one of Cleveland's top-tier civic volunteers while raising two children, and was also a talented silkscreen artist. Her giant prints of seashores and flowers—many with images of human genitalia tucked into waves and petals—hang throughout my home.

Soon after Gaylee turned forty, she started feeling her life was missing something. Most women I know respond to such needling midlife urges by joining book clubs or learning sign language. Gaylee went to medical school. Eight years later, she was a full-time internist who fired patients if they didn't stop smoking after a year and during her annual reviews was always reprimanded for taking too long with her patients, who adored her.

I was not her patient, as I decided long ago that I didn't want a friend trying to make small talk while she had my legs up in stirrups. However, I'd been going to my own doctor, Patricia Kellner, for so long that she'd become my friend, too, so Gaylee wasn't exactly dissuaded from taking a medical interest in my comings and goings. She knew I'd had chronic asthma since I was sixteen, and starting about thirty seconds after Sherrod declared his race for the Senate, she regularly checked in to make sure I was taking care of myself. For a while, I lied to her with impunity, assuring her that I was keeping up with exercise (
so
not) and vitamins (not a one) and getting plenty of sleep (not even close). Then one evening, right around six, her call woke me up—in the car.

“Con?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to figure out (a) whose voice was on the phone and (b) when did it start to snow? “Were you asleep?”

“Um, well, yeah. Just a little nap.”

A driver in the car next to me slammed her door and pressed that annoying little key chain button, thus prompting her horn to trumpet to the entire world that her locks were securely engaged.

“Are you in a car?”

“Um, well, yeah.”

“You're sleeping in your
car
?”

“Only for a few minutes.”

“Where are you?”

I thought we'd just established that. “In my car?”

“
Where
in your car?”

“At Heinen's.”

“Were you getting groceries?”

“That was the plan.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I'm fine.”

“You're not fine,” she said. “You're sleeping in the middle of a parking lot at six o'clock at night.”

“Actually, I'm not really in the middle, I'm more on the side, near the Home Depot.”

“This is funny?”

“Apparently not.”

From that moment on, Gaylee was on the case. Her dozens of phone messages throughout the campaign usually began, “Not that you think you actually
need
me, but I am wondering how you're doing, and if you don't call back soon I'll assume you're asleep in a car somewhere….”

         

B
Y
J
ANUARY, WE WERE DESPERATE FOR SOME GOOD NEWS IN THE
campaign, and it came delivered by lanky, six-foot-one John Ryan, who agreed in mid-January to become Sherrod's campaign manager. Our campaign was a mess. We were hiring people willy-nilly, and Sherrod was still getting hammered by bloggers and some Democratic activists for opposing Hackett in the upcoming May primary. The fundraising machine was all but hibernating. We knew it, the press knew it, every Democrat we ran into knew it. John Ryan knew it, too, but it didn't stop him from taking one of the biggest leaps of his career.

We'd had a hard time finding a campaign manager. At first, Sherrod had interviewed candidates, many of them high-profile, who were recommended by the national Democratic Party. All of them were from somewhere other than Ohio. One by one, they assured us they weren't coming to our state any time soon. Either they couldn't bring themselves to work in that state that had broken so many Kerry supporters' hearts, or they simply didn't think Sherrod could win. They never said that outright, of course, but they'd say things like, “Wow, you've got a tough race ahead,” or, “Whew, you're going to need an
awful
lot of money to beat Karl Rove.”

To this day, we don't know how we finally got the sense to turn to John Ryan. We've known him for years, and that's what we always call him, John Ryan, two names, like John Boy from
The Waltons.
Can't explain it. It's just who he is to us.

Well, he's that, and so much more.

For one thing, he was the devoted father of three daughters, and Sherrod often said John Ryan seemed to love his girls as much as Sherrod loved his. That mattered to Sherrod, who would throw himself across train tracks for his Emily and Elizabeth. Like Sherrod, John Ryan regularly brought his girls to political events, so they often ran into each other with daughters in tow.

Sherrod grew close to Ryan because of their mutual passion for workers' rights and social justice. John Ryan was only twenty-one when he was elected president of the local union of the Communications Workers of America. In 1996, he became president of the Cleveland AFL-CIO. Ryan transformed their grassroots political operation into a well-oiled machine that backed candidates and issues that regularly won. He was an ardent, in-your-face union activist who also knew how to get along with people in the business community.
Crain's Cleveland Business
named Ryan the fourth most influential Clevelander in their 2003 Top Forty listing.

One of my favorite John Ryan stories involves a discussion he had with his union activist father, Arthur, toward the end of his life. Arthur was in his mid-eighties, suffering from dementia and living in a nursing home. John Ryan regularly visited his dad late at night, after work and his many meetings, and one evening he showed up looking especially tired. He was volunteering nearly full-time for a countywide Democratic candidate, and his father asked if he was getting paid overtime.

“What's that, Dad?”

“Overtime. You getting overtime for that?”

“No, Dad.”

“You know what you need, son?”

“What's that, Dad?”

“You need a union.”

I knew John Ryan from my time as a reporter and a union member with the Newspaper Guild–CWA. I didn't know a reporter who didn't trust him, and so it was easy to build a friendship once I started dating Sherrod. I continued to like him even after he spent months trying to cajole Sherrod into running for governor.

“Guv'nor,” he'd say, whenever he ran into us.

“Mrs. Guv'nor,” he'd add, nodding at my furrowed brow and then laughing in his high-pitched giggle.

One evening, after yet another candidate for campaign manager had turned us down, Sherrod and I were sitting in our family room and John Ryan's name came up. I don't know why, or how, and Sherrod can't remember either. We do, however, applaud ourselves now for our momentary flash of genius in a bumbling campaign at the time.

“John Ryan believes in you,” I said.

“John Ryan believes in the work,” Sherrod said.

“You can trust him.”

Sherrod nodded. “Nobody works harder than John Ryan.”

Sherrod walked upstairs to his office and made the call. He came downstairs, his face clouded.

“He's thinking about it,” he said. “He's not sure he's up to it.”

The following account of my subsequent and immediate call to John Ryan comes from him. I swear I don't remember this conversation, but I'm just as certain that John Ryan would never lie. Besides, it sounds like the act of a desperate wife.

According to John Ryan, I picked up the phone and dialed his cell number.

“John Ryan?”

“Hey, Connie. Hi.”

“I know Sherrod just called you, and I know what he wants you to do.”

“Okay. Well, I'm going to give it a lot of thought—”

“Look, John Ryan. If this is about your family, then I understand why you can't do this. But otherwise, I don't want to hear it. We need you.”

And then John Ryan says I hung up on him.

John Ryan called the next day and said his wife, Jeanne, said he should do it.

For the rest of the campaign, when anyone asked John Ryan why he took the job, he said, “Catholic guilt and Connie Schultz's call.”

In keeping with the theme of our campaign, almost everyone told us we were nuts: No labor guy from Cleveland could possibly run a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.

That's what they said.

We are happy to report that they were wrong.

         

A
FTER
T
HE
P
LAIN
D
EALER
'
S COVERAGE OF THE PLAGIARISM INCIDENT
, I distanced myself from any and all at the paper who would be covering Sherrod's race. That included the entire editorial board and all the politics writers. In a couple of instances, this meant altering relationships with those I considered friends. It just seemed better for them, and for me, if we avoided talking altogether. I had gone from being a colleague to a potential source in the time it took Sherrod to say “I'm in.”

At the end of January,
The Plain Dealer
launched its new political website, which included a blog called
Openers,
designed to make our coverage more immediate. Gone were the days when newspapers could keep a loyal readership simply by publishing a morning newspaper. The Internet, with its breaking-news immediacy, had changed that landscape, and newspapers were slowly learning how to compete.

Local political bloggers groused that
The Plain Dealer
's chief motive was to neutralize their relevance, but that presumed
The Plain Dealer
had been paying much attention to them in the first place. At that point, they were gnats on the screen door. Later, some area bloggers, such as Jeff Coryell of
Ohio 2006
and Chris Baker of
Ohio 2nd,
would distinguish themselves as astute, sometimes newsbreaking, observers on Ohio's political scene. Others would write themselves into irrelevance.

Openers
was actually a part of Doug Clifton's strategy for
The Plain Dealer
to dominate the mainstream media's coverage of Ohio's statewide elections. We knew from the 2004 election that our statewide races, particularly those for governor and the Senate, would be fodder for political writers around the country. Clifton was determined that no one would beat us in our own backyard.

As for the bloggers, the only thing Clifton seemed to care about was the vitriol they unloaded with predictable regularity on
The Plain Dealer.
Publicly, he said he didn't care about bloggers, but I was having a hard time believing that in light of his column about my marriage to Sherrod, which cited a passage from an anonymous blogger as his reason for writing it in the first place.

The Plain Dealer
's blog allowed
Plain Dealer
political writers to file dispatches from the road throughout the day, encouraging political junkies to visit the newspaper's website regularly. It also provided a forum for audiotaped interviews with candidates. Paul Hackett's interview with the editorial board, which was rescheduled after he canceled the first time, was taped and then posted on
Openers.

Immediately, Sherrod's campaign staff protested because, several weeks earlier, Sherrod had initiated a meeting with the
Plain Dealer
editorial board to discuss what he considered to be their unfair coverage of the campaign. An audiotape of that spirited discussion, though, had not been posted on the website.

Despite the suspicions of the campaign staff, this oversight was not, as it turned out, evidence of malice or a conspiracy against Sherrod. When a staffer called
Openers
editor Jean Dubail to ask why, his answer was simple: No one had taped Sherrod's interview because it was not yet common practice. I knew Jean well, as both a respected colleague and a friend. I didn't for a moment doubt his word.

Nevertheless, Hackett's audio did give him a leg up on coverage, which rankled some of Sherrod's staff. Privately, I worried that we were becoming hypersensitive to every hiccup in the press.

Much more disconcerting to me personally was
The Plain Dealer
's decision to link to local political blogs on
Openers.
One of the links on the site was ardently pro-Hackett and regularly bashed Sherrod and me, at one point running a post referring to my “tits” in response to a lighthearted column I'd written about blogs. Another blogger predicted that DeWine supporters would “dismantle Connie and leave pieces of her bleeding at the roadside.”

In early February, I sat at my desk in the newsroom and let sink in what was unfolding. With one click,
Plain Dealer
readers could devour whatever lies, mischaracterizations, and attacks bloggers felt like writing about us on any given day.

I understood that no newspaper covering Ohio politics could ignore the blogs. I also understood it was time for me to leave.

I talked to Karen Sandstrom, my longtime friend who had become my supervisor at the paper the previous year. She was sick over some of the blogs, but, like me, felt that
The Plain Dealer
couldn't ignore them. She was sympathetic, but she also knew that I had already been struggling mightily over what I could and, increasingly, could not write about in my column.

“I wrote about
pantyhose,
” I said, wincing at the recent memory.

She smiled. “It was very funny.”

“I can't do funny all the time,” I said. “I can't stop writing about all the things that really matter.”