The coffee house candidate: the engrossing tale of a Seattle cab driver's ill-fated run for local office.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan
• Position: On Political Books - Zioncheck for President - Book review

Grant Cogswell was a cab driver and sometime poet who had led, with another cabbie, a quixotic ballot campaign to expand Seattle's downtown monorail and won. Phil Campbell was a writer for a Seattle weekly who was tired of being an outrage machine in a city that provided little occasion for it.

Campbell got fired. (His boss was syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage of "Savage Love" fame.) Cogswell asked Campbell to manage his campaign for the Seattle City Council. Zioncheck for President is the story of that campaign.

It is not a campaign memoir in the usual sense. There is not much on strategy and issues; and still less blow-by-blow. The candidate himself is somewhat blurry, beyond his crabbing about printing errors and distaste for fundraising calls. Basically, he comes across as impassioned in a good way--the kind of fellow who sits in coffee houses during the long grey Seattle winters and broods on the absurdity of "freeways" jammed with cars that burn gas as they go nowhere.

Cogswell is the believer, while Campbell is a man trying to believe, but who never truly can. He's an observer as much as a participant, the novelist as campaign manager. I suspect the thought that this could be book material occurred to him early on.

I was prepared for a snarky putdown of local politics. Instead, I entered a world I became sorry to leave. The main setting is the Seattle subculture defined roughly by Kurt Cobain at one end and the WTO protests at the other. It's the sort of grunge idealism of people who might have been bike messengers one day, or maybe still are, somehow both cynical and naive. They think that nirvana really is going to come in the form of a rock band and are on what seems an almost nightly quest to find it.

These folks sally forth into the precincts of Seattle's mainstream Democrats, who are right-thinking in a way that perhaps helps explain why their kids might become slackers. A difficult fact of the campaign was that Cogswell was challenging the only black member of the council--a cautious and unexceptional fellow, but black; and to white Seattle-ites for whom color is a symbol more than a neighbor, this was big. "We can't vote against the colored guy," one man shouts at a meeting in a white district. "There needs to be at least one of those."

Another awkward fact was that Cogswell had vocally supported Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential campaign, and had been as disdainful of mainstream Democrats as Nader himself was. Campbell...