Seattlest Interview: Phil Campbell, Author of Zioncheck For President

Former Stranger news guy Phil Campbell was a campaign manager in an ill-fated bid for Richard McIver's City Council seat a few years ago and wrote a book about that experience that's funny, sad, informative and awesome. It's called Zioncheck For President: A True Story of Idealism and Madness in American Politics. While we were reading it we alternately wanted to go on a molotov cocktail bender, discourage everyone we know from ever running for any kind of public office anywhere (including class treasurer), drive off a bridge, and convince a friend that a run for city council would be a good idea. Not exactly in that order.

Alright, let's talk about The Stranger - Who's the biggest asshole there? I'm kidding, but very early on in Zioncheck For President you're fired from The Stranger. This week they excerpted your book. How was that experience?

The Stranger...yeah, go figure. I get fired from there, then a month or two later my girlfriend gets hired there on my starting salary. So months after I no longer work there I still hear about who's banging who and other Stranger gossip I didn't need to know about. A year later Dan Savage is a guest at my wedding to the same girlfriend [art critic Emily Hall]. Life's funny that way.

I'm not saying I agree that I should have been fired - in fact I'd like to quote something Michael Schaub wrote in Bookslut after reading Zioncheck this week: "What were you thinking, Stranger?" - but I'm not the kind of person who burns bridges intentionally (unintentionally is a different story), and even though I'm not above holding a grudge every now and then I try to do what most mature people do when I get one: Bottle it up and not let the rest of the world see it until it becomes an ulcerated mess.

The Stranger excerpted my book because Savage knows I'm a good writer. Savage didn't fire me because I was dumb. He fired me because I was having a hard time with the provocateur format the news section runs on. I was burnt out and, even though I didn't want to admit it, I needed a change. Hence Grant Cogswell's campaign, followed by the book about Grant Cogswell's campaign.

Are you still participating in the alt-weekly-o-sphere?

No. I'm not actively doing anything with weeklies at the moment, except try to get them to review Zioncheck. I've stayed away from most things, actually. I've been going with my wife to a lot of art galleries and I've been reading a lot of fiction, contemporary and classical. I'm digesting a lot of new and old ideas, which is an underrated concept for writers these days. If you work for weeklies, for example, it's all about productivity - word counts are like financial bottom lines, often grossly unfair ones. I understand The Stranger now has a blog, and that all the writers and editors have to contribute to or else. If they had ordered me, while I was working there, to write for that blog every day ON TOP OF my weekly assignments, someone in that office would have gotten murdered.

This book seems very much like the centerpiece of a "moving on" project and yet the promotion of the book involves Bumbershoot readings, dealings with The Stranger and probably a number of Seattle-based interviews. Falling in love again or are you still jonseing to be done with the city once and for all?

Certainly I was trying to come to terms with a lot of decisions I had made in my 20s, as a fanatical reporter and as a humorously misguided guilty white liberal. That's not an easy thing to do - write about your 20s and your political beliefs without being preachy or solipsistic. I like to think I pulled it off.

As for Seattle, I wanted to address my idea of the city in my own way. Charles D'Ambrosio, Jonathan Raban, Matt Briggs, Rebecca Brown -- these writers each have a distinctive literary vision of Seattle. An insider's perpective, for the most part. I have the perspective of the outsider who openly admits he doesn't 'get' Seattle. I've written thousands of very funny words that I never used just on how passive aggressive Seattleites can be. I cut most of them out because at a certain point they seemed excessive. Maybe when I create a website I'll post a few of them, I don't know.

And, no, I'm not falling in love with Seattle, though when I came back this summer to visit I did realize that I had taken for granted a lot of things when I had lived there. It's a gorgeous city. Puget Sound and the mountains are astonishing backdrops.

As for promoting the book, I went to places where it would get attention. Bumbershoot made perfect sense, and it was an extremely enjoyable experience. I may be gone, but I've left behind a book about the city. No point re-inventing the wheel when it came to marketing.

A lot of the issues from the campaign the book covers and the characters involved are still front and center in Seattle. Do you follow Seattle politics at all? The monorail? The book is finished, but do you feel any compulsion to go back and add a second epilogue now that, for example, the monorail is on the ropes?

Nope, no second epilogue, no dramatic re-entrance. One of the things I did when I stopped working on Grant's campaign was to stop obsessing over local news. That felt necessary to me because I wanted to write about Seattle during a particular time period - from WTO protests through 9/11 - and if I allowed myself to fret over the present I'd lose touch with my perspective on the past.
I have read some local news articles sporadically but I don't really have an opinion the way I used to. It's a shame monorail's having so many problems, that's for sure. But I've got other ideas I want to pursue. Like Detroit. I may want to write about the city of Detroit next. I spent summers with my grandma there when I was a kid. To me, a city like Detroit is much more interesting than Seattle. Seattle is all about fog, dreams, and the subconscious, with a few well-attired hikers parading by. Detroit is grit and steel and crime. I may want to explore harder realities for a while.

The events described in Zioncheck For President seem like they occurred just yesterday. In fact some of them are still occurring tomorrow. It's rare to read something that seems so much like a novel and revolves around events that still seem so immediate. Can you talk a little about when you started writing Zioncheck and the timeline to publication? Also, how the hell do you convince a New York imprint to publish a book about grassroots Seattle politics?

Funny how that statement reminds me of William Faulkner's quote - "The past is never dead. It's not even past." I'd never thought that very Southern idea could be applied to Seattle. Seattle's supposed to be the metropolis of the future, not a place mired in its own problems.

I started writing Zioncheck a couple months after the campaign ended. I had no idea what I was doing, so I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I knew that there was a book in there. All the elements were present. Grant's a fascinating character, and our relationship during the campaign was an odd one, to say the least. Political campaigns provide natural narrative arcs, for another, and my housemate's erratic behavior seemed to add a deeper meaning to everything. Plus there was Grant Cogswell's obsession with Marion Zioncheck, the only US Congressman ever sent to an insane asylum. It was all there, I just had to draw out some greater meaning from it.

As for getting a New York publisher to accept this book, I have to admit that, had I known then what I know now about the publishing industry, I may not have attempted to write this. But what kept me writing and rewriting for three years was the fact that I never really looked at this as a 'Seattle book.' I focused on characters and personalities. I pursued larger ideas - idealism and madness, like the subtitle suggests. And almost everyone loves local politics, so it was really just a question of making Seattle's politics identifiable for non-Seattleites. In fact that was probably the most difficult problem in writing the book.

Are you disappointed that Grant Cogswell's thrown in the towel with regards to local politics?

I think you're referring to the column Grant wrote for The Belltown Messenger, in which he talks about how disappointed I was that he did not pursue a career in politics after the 2001 campaign. Well, yes, I was disappointed with him. He had done extremely well for a guy running against an incumbent with 2.5 times the money, and he had emerged from that campaign with a grace and maturity that made people believe he was really going to be somebody in local politics, yet after one lousy defeat he just quit. It was disheartening to see him do that.

It's not an easy thing to explain, but when you work 16-17 hour days for a person for nearly five months, you want that person to go all the way with it, to make your time investment feel worthwhile.
So I already told Grant this, and it looks like he's written about me telling him this, so there's no point in pretending otherwise. But I still have a great deal of respect for him. He's smart and passionate and really cares about Seattle. And I bet the movie he's producing will kick ass.

The book ends on kind of a down note. What, if anything, did you and Grant accomplish with the campaign for City Council?

What did we accomplish? Nothing. We lost. Grant quit politics and I left town, end of story. To me, more non-fiction needs to end this way; real life isn't always a happy ending, so why do we keep trying to twist it around so that it becomes one?

I don't regret having managed that campaign, not one bit, but it's not an experience I want to relive, either. Politics is hard. I now completely understand why we seem to only get egotistical wackos running for office in this country. You're putting yourself completely out there, you have to kiss the asses of people you don't like to raise money and win votes, you have to make countless compromises� count me out, thanks. I could have done without Grant denting my car with his foot in a rage during the height of the campaign. I sure as hell can't believe I lost my sex drive over one lousy political season. When have you ever heard of that happening before? In Primary Colors everybody got to have crazy campaign sex. Not me, though, I had to implode, not, pardon the pun, explode.

Maybe this book will do some good, however. Grant gains a little notoriety, which I have no doubt he'll find a way to capitalize on, and I might be able to use this to gain opportunities to write other things I want to write. So there may be a happy ending after all.

What's wrong with the local political system? If you had a free hand to make changes to the way local politicians are elected is there anything that could be done to fix it?

Easy - city council district representation. It's impossible to believe that 'liberal' Seattle is so obsessed with conflict avoidance that they're unwilling to let their councilmembers represent smaller blocs of constituents. The reason trotted out each time whenever that issue comes up for a vote is that it would only cause divisiveness. I don't get it. Politics is supposed to be divisive. People quite frequently disagree for genuine reasons. The current city council structure, in which all the councilmembers represent all the citizens, means that nobody is ever effectively accountable to representing valid minority points of view. That's no way for local politics to work.

Also, someone needs to bitch-slap Greg Nickels. That guy's fund-raising is out of control. Moreover, he's a terrible poker player.

What's next for Phil Campbell? Are you working on another book?

Well, after I have my chicken dinner I'll probably get a beer and watch a movie. Then I'll go to bed. Like I said, right now I feel like I'm busy just absorbing some new ideas that I've been pondering. I'm thinking about a novel, as well as some long magazine pieces, but it's too early to talk about any of that.