Zioncheck for President: A True Story of Idealism and Madness in American Politics - Softcover

Campbell, Phillip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560257504 ISBN 13: 9781560257509

Publisher: Nation Books, 2005

Synopsis

This offbeat true story is a comedy and a tragedy about politics, from anti-globalist protest to domestic turmoil. It's about idealism, obsession and failure in Seattle, a progressive city on the fringe of America's continent and consciousness.

Grant Cogswell is a poet, a punk rock-fan, an anarchist, a grassroots activist, and one very temperamental character. He loves Seattle so much he has the city logo tattooed on his arm. In the summer of 2001 he decides to run for city council. He's so determined to win that he'll even wear a polar-bear suit to a city hall meeting. Phil Campbell, the author, is a burnt-out recently fired alt-weekly reporter, a manic depressive who sees few reasons to live. Inspired by his friend Grant’s passion, and without anything better to do, he agrees to manage Grant's campaign. For eighteen weeks, Phil devotes himself to Grant’s grassroots challenge—all the while fending an overzealous roommate challenging him for his position as manager of their shared house. Overshadowing the story is the tale of U.S. Rep. Marion Anthony Zioncheck, a legendary boozer and forgotten lefty radical from the 1930s. As Grant's campaign unfolds, so does the story of Zioncheck's tragedy — his rise and fall from an energetic young politico to a madman who is sent to the insane asylum. The question: Is Zioncheck's tale a lesson already learned, or a prophecy waiting to be repeated?

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

A city council race, even when it involves an impassioned punk rock activist, isn't exactly the stuff of legend. But Campbell, who also served as the campaign manager for Grant Cogswell's bid for a seat on the Seattle City Council, injects humor and tension into his account of the race. Inspired in part by a radical congressman named Marion Zioncheck who had grand ideas but failed spectacularly, Cogswell embarks on a quest to make a difference in local government, building his platform around public transportation issues. The two have a steep learning curve ahead of them, and things like securing campaign donors, recruiting campaign volunteers, dealing with the media and creating campaign propaganda quickly prove to be multiple sources of stress. To compound matters, Campbell wrestles with a houseful of quirky roommates, one of whom is an off-center alcoholic with a new handgun he can't stop playing with. Campbell skillfully captures the tension, frustrations and small victories that serve as emotional mileposts on a campaign, and his running commentary on the city of Seattle and its neighborhoods and citizens give depth to the narrative. The book picks up as it nears its conclusion, although an unwisely placed interlude about Marion Zioncheck hampers the momentum. Campbell's conclusion is tight and highly satisfying, although his closing commentary feels as if it has been cut short. Still, Campbell's ability to capture the enthusiasm as well as the exhaustion involved in a losing municipal campaign is a true feat.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Punk rocker, political activist, and part-time poet Grant Cogswell, convinced that the FBI has tapped his phone (he participated in the famous Seattle World Trade Organization protests, you see), enlisted Campbell, recently fired from the alternative weekly The Stranger, to help him run for a city council seat. But he still remained very definitely at loose ends. Campbell's account of Cogswell's odd-but-true campaign takes its title from the efforts of hard-drinking Depression-era Congressman Marion Zioncheck to expand FDR's New Deal. Zioncheck went mad and killed himself. Cogswell was less dramatic. He called a press conference (which no one attended) to announce that he was running against Richard McIver, "hardly the apex of evil . . . a genial bureaucrat with few ideas and a lot of money and lazy endorsements," says Campbell, though "in our minds, he represented the biggest problem in the American political system." Campbell juxtaposes Zioncheck's and Cogswell's respective political fortunes, thereby transcending a merely ironic tale of grassroots politics to provoke thought about history and its lessons. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Nation Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1560257504
• ISBN 13: 9781560257509
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336