An Underdog Has His Day

· On bribery: "I have one word for you: CANDY! Candy was always the thing that swayed my vote." (Elizabeth, Michigan)

In the updated "How to Win a High School Election," there's a blurb from Marin Cogan of Edinboro, Pa., one of the countless students who have written to Marx over the years to thank him for helping them.

"My name is Marin and I'm a 13 year old student," she wrote. "Today I was announced the new Student Body President of my school. I was the only girl running and my opponents were all well liked and popular. . . . There is a very good chance I never would have won and the book helped. It really did. Pretty cool huh? Well the girl known as Miss President wanted to say thank you for the help."

Now 20 and a student at the University of Pittsburgh, Cogan knows it would not have been the end of the world if she had lost her race at James W. Parker Middle School. But back then, "I thought it was the best day of my young life," she said in an interview. "I told my parents and they came home with flowers for me. It did seem like the biggest thing that had happened to me."

As a boy growing up in South Florida, the son of a dentist and dental hygienist, Marx had a private world where he was a little celebrity. Saturday evenings and Sundays for years, he was one of two boy singers in a local music teacher's No. 1 Bar Mitzvah Band, crooning romantic ballads in his navy-blue three-piece tux. Twelve-year-old girls went crazy for him, and in this small universe, he was a star.

But at Pine Crest, a Fort Lauderdale school with something like 55 teams, he kept this life secret. "Guys usually don't sing and dance and put on shows. The guys all did football and baseball," his mother, Wendy, said.

And there was Marx, the youngest in the class, the least coordinated, the worst at sports. Tired of being a high school nobody and "emotionally devastated," he says, he decided to "make himself wanted."

"How to Win a High School Election" begins with his bid for vice president of student council.

He knew he'd have to use cunning to beat his two opponents, one a popular cheerleader and multiple-term class officer, the other a top student who had been on student council for years. Pizza was the solution.

"I decided that the school rule prohibiting students from ordering pizza deliveries at lunchtime was worth addressing," he writes. "So I went to the principal and discussed the issue with him, and he explained to me that the rule was made years ago because students were leaving their pizza boxes all over the school, creating a mess. I asked him if we could have a 'trial period.' "

The principal agreed. Marx called up the local pizza parlor and struck a deal to get students a special lunch price. When the time came for his speech, he discussed the pizza project as "an example of the things I would do in office, not just talk about."

The campaign strategy paid off. Marx won, and he felt great. "At least for the next year, I held my head higher. I was really proud of myself," Marx recalls.