Friday, December 21, 2018

I'm Liking Sherrod Brown More and More, Because I Freaking LOVE His Wife


Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio has a voice that puts me in a check-writing trance. It's a whiskey and cigarettes voice, a school of hard knocks voice, a voice that suggests truth and vision gained the old-fashioned way ... via hard, instructive experience. He's thinking about running for president, and I'm thinking about supporting him.

He's what Beto O'Rourke can become if he lasts -- a seasoned warrior for the working man. Where Beto is callow youth, Sherrod Brown is grizzled veteran. It's all in what you think the working-class middle-of-the-country will support in 2020.

Connie Schultz
But Sherrod's wife, Connie Schultz ... hoo boy!
She’s not just a spouse who’s a journalist. She’s a spouse who’s a journalist who’s a liberal feminist columnist who’s won a Pulitzer Prize and teaches journalism at her alma mater at Kent State University. She’s a spouse who’s a journalist who’s a liberal feminist columnist who’s won a Pulitzer Prize and who is a Christian who actually practices her faith. She’s a spouse who’s a journalist who’s a liberal feminist columnist who’s won a Pulitzer Prize who is a Christian and who also packs a blue-collar backstory as the Ashtabula-born-and-bred-daughter of a maintenance mechanic and a nurse’s aide. She has working-class cred, a powerful platform and opinions she is utterly unafraid to express. And she’s all these things at a moment when the current president is unceasing with his anti-press invective. 
“I am the woman he hates,” Schultz said....
That's taken from a stunning profile of Connie Schultz in Politico, which you should read. It might make you like Sherrod Brown because he loves Connie Schultz too.

Senator Sherrod Brown
Sherrod wrote her a flirtatious 2002 email after reading one of her columns in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He compared her to Barbara Kingsolver, which shows he reads and reads the right people. Barbara Kingsolver is our neighbor over the mountain in the fields of Meadowview, Virginia, where she's joint owner of the Harvest Table Restaurant, which cooks up dishes from produce produced on Kingsolver's own farm. You should drop everything to visit that restaurant.

I loved Barbara Kingsolver before I loved Connie Schultz, but love pulls everything even and every level seeks its own water. Both these amazing women make me think there's still some hope on this morning in America when everything else appears to be whirling apart.

The men who love such women and married them despite their brilliance ... such a man might deserve to be president of these United States!

1 comment:

Opinionated said...

my guess: They married them BECAUSE OF their brilliance.