The first time I heard it, I laughed. Oh, come on, I thought. He didn’t just say that. We were at a restaurant in southern Ohio, where a hundred or so Democrats and a handful of young campaign workers had gathered to hear my husband, Sherrod Brown, announce for the seventh time in two days why he was running for the United States Senate. The party chairman of the county stood up at the lectern and in a loud, booming voice, introduced “Congressman Sherrod Brown–and his lovely wife.” By Week 40 of the campaign, I had been introduced that way nearly a hundred times. I stopped counting once we hit the 50 marker. I knew I was not the point at these gatherings, and I was so proud of the man who was. Also, I realized I was getting cranky about something I could not change. If I couldn’t rely on a sense of humor, I was in for one long year on the campaign trail. Writing with her trademark warmth, wit, and common sense, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz reveals the rigors, adrenaline joys, and absolute madness of a new marriage at midlife and campaigning with her husband, now the junior senator from Ohio. She describes the chain of events leading up to Sherrod’s decision to campaign for Senate (he would not run without his wife’s unequivocal support) in a state where no Democrat had won statewide office for twelve years. She writes about the moment her friends in the press became not so friendly; the constant campaign demands on her marriage and family life; a personal tragedy that came out of the blue. She gives us a candid behind-the-scenes look at the often ludicrous trials and tribulations of being an opinionated columnist, a political wife, and a newly married woman in her forties, and the rigors of political life: audacious bloggers, ruthless adversaries, campaign fatigue, political divas, the no-small-planes agreement, and staffers young enough to be her children suddenly directing her and her husband’s every move. Filled with eye-opening revelations about the election process, . . . and His Lovely Wife illuminates through one woman’s story a marriage, our political system, our working lives, and our nation. Connie Schultz is outspoken, passionate, and very public about her opinions–in other words, every political consultant’s nightmare, and every reader’s dream. In 2005, when her husband, Congressman Sherrod Brown, announced his intention to run for the U.S. Senate, Schultz, columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, suddenly went from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and commentator to relative obscurity as a politician's wife. When Brown announced his campaign—and attempt to be the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Ohio in 14 years—she was momentarily at a loss about what it would mean for her as she listened to criticism about her decision to keep her job and her name. Finally, on leave from her job as columnist, she settled into observing the campaign from the perspective of a political wife and writing about the experience of a relatively new marriage weathering a campaign. Schultz recounts the stresses and tensions of the campaign: a fund-raiser scheduled on their second anniversary, political operatives rifling through the family's garbage, coping with negative press and her husband's reactions, concerns that her presence would be viewed as her paper's endorsement of Brown's candidacy. A revealing and amusing look at campaigns from a wife's perspective. Bush, Vanessa Connie Schultz, a biweekly columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer/Creators Syndicate , won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2005. Her other awards include the Scripps-Howard National Journalism Award, the National Headliners Award, the James Batten Medal, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award for social-justice reporting. Her narrative series “The Burden of Innocence,” which chronicled the life of a man wrongly incarcerated for rape, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Connie Schultz is married to Ohio’s junior senator, Sherrod Brown, and has two children and two stepchildren. Chapter One Trash Talk Two weeks after Sherrod decided to run for the Senate, I was hanging out at home with our dog, Gracie, when a white van pulled up in front of our house and slowed to a stop next to the bags of garbage piled at the end of our driveway. It was trash day, and we were so new to this neighborhood that for a moment I thought maybe we’d moved to a place where they use vans instead of garbage trucks to pick up the trash. What did I know about the genteel far west side of Cleveland? I was fresh from two decades on the gritty east side, where no two homes looked alike and trash day meant dodging redesigned golf carts that zipped into the driveway and scooped up everything in sight faster than you could scream, “Wait, no, not the lawn furniture!” This new neighborhood was way more sedate than that, if you didn’t count the roar of Weedwackers, leaf blowers, and ride ’em lawn mowers. Still, everything sure looked calm on our sapl