The power behind ‘Power Breakfast’

Every day, Capitol Hill gets inundated with political news, so much so that it can’t possibly digest it all. Each morning, however, in the span of two minutes, political Washington gets a dose of the day’s affairs in a compact segment called “Power Breakfast.”

Created in October of last year, Todd Zwillich, 36, a freelance correspondent for Capitol News Connection (CNC), was asked to be at its helm for WAMU, a National Public Radio station. The segment is heard only in Washington.

“I was excited, nervous,” recalls Zwillich. “I wasn’t sure what it was going to be like being plugged right into the middle of people’s mornings.”

For Washington, that means his segment runs first at 5:36 a.m. and then again at 7:37 a.m., when some politicians are minutes away from their first “power meeting” of the day. “For many people it’s snooze fodder,” he says, acknowledging that other political types hear his segment half-asleep, as they are waking or crawling out of bed.

Zwillich did not start out in radio, but it seems it is where he was destined to land.

“I’ve always wanted to be on the radio ever since I was a kid,” he says, recalling being 13 and staying up late to listen to everything from Rush Limbaugh and then-radio correspondent Larry King to Dr. Demento and Jim Bohannon.

“I like the way they talk,” he says. “I’ve always had a thing for delivery. I didn’t have a TV in my room. I don’t know if my parents knew.”

For Zwillich, being on the radio is about acting as much as it is about journalism. “It wasn’t a journalism thing — it sort of runs in my family,” he says, explaining that his mother is a part-time actress who appeared in “Head of State” and as an extra in “State of Play.” His sister was a TV host in Canada.

He, too, has always been artistic. He once played cello in a pit orchestra, but has since abandoned it: “Who has the time?” he says, insisting he was “not an orchestra geek. I was stunningly hip for the string section.”

Born in Denver, Zwillich moved to Hershey, Pa., when he was 10 and stayed there through high school. He then moved to Montreal to attend McGill University, where he began studying neuroscience. “That did not happen,” he says, because he was doing research in a laboratory, a rats-in-mazes type of thing where rats were chasing after Froot Loops.

Zwillich was dissuaded from pursuing the field seriously after hearing how tough it was to find grants for such work, so he bailed. Upon graduation he traveled the world for a year, visiting places in West Africa such as Senegal and Mali.

He returned to Montreal but had to go “underground” for a couple of months because he had no visa. He worked as a bike messenger, where he learned to dodge cabs, eat candy bars at 40 kilometers per hour and swear in Canadian French.

Eventually he left for Washington, where he began writing for a medical and science trade publication, followed by three years at Reuters and freelance stints at UPI, The Lancet and WebMD. He wrote about everything from Medicare to incontinence drugs and erectile dysfunction.

Two and a half years ago, before signing on with CNC, he was a freelance print journalist. Today, Zwillich is just where he wants to be, but with no particular eye cast toward the future. “People in Washington, they want to feel like they know what’s happening in this town,” he says.

“Obviously, I try to make it entertaining, not goofy, although I do like goofy. I listened to Dr. Demento.”