Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [12]
It was heady stuff, but I sure wasn’t overconfident. I mean, it had been a fun ride, but I knew I could be back with my family soon on our thirty-two-acre horse ranch. And when this reporter asked, did I really think I could govern, I gave him a straight answer. I said, “I’ve jumped out of thirty-four airplanes in my life. I’ve dived 212 feet under the water. I’ve swum with sharks. I did things that would make Skip and Norm wet their pants.” (Referring to my two opponents, Democrat Skip Humphrey and Republican Norm Coleman). Which made all the media types laugh. Then I added, “This is simply governing and common sense and logic. Nothing more. Nothing less. I can do the job.”
TERRY: As we continued moving across the state, I knew. When you would pull into a tiny town at 11 o’clock at night, and find about Seven hundredu people freezing in a parking lot, holding up babies and old Jesse Ventura wrestling figures, I knew it was going to happen. But I still couldn’t fathom it. It was like saying we were going to get the Hope Diamond—but you have no clue what it looks like, feels like, or will be like when you own it.
We were an hour or two late getting to Hutchinson, Minnesota, our last stop of the night. We didn’t know what the turnout would be. It was a Sunday, and people had to go to work the next day. And there were all these people waiting! Hundreds of them! I’ll always remember Terry turning to me and saying, “My God, you’re going to win!”
We stole the headlines from the other two candidates at the most critical time of the election, the weekend before, when I think a lot of people make up their minds. A lot of the undecideds wait until virtually the eleventh hour. On that Tuesday, I heard rumors that people were flocking to the polls. Minnesota has a unique system where you don’t have to preregister to vote; you can do so right on election day. Supposedly, there were five times the number of people standing in the registration lines as in the voting lines. Over in Todd County, where they’d planned on as high as an 80 percent turnout, so many folks showed up that they ran out of printed ballots. When the polls closed that night, Minnesota ended up leading the country with a 61 percent voter turnout. Shamefully, the national average was 37 percent.
Of course, I didn’t know about these things until later. When I went to cast my ballot and the press asked me for interviews, I said it would have to be quick because my favorite TV show—The Young and the Restless—was about to come on. That afternoon, I lay down on my bed and put Oliver Stone’s brilliant movie JFK on the VCR.
Now, out at Canterbury Park, where the long shots sometimes come through, we started watching the returns. There was a feeling of electricity in the air. It looked more like a rock concert than anything, a partying crowd wearing blue jeans and ball caps and downing tap-beer. That was just the way I wanted it. When the first two exit polls were announced, I was, as everyone expected, in third place. Then, at 3 percent of the vote, I passed Coleman. And at 5 percent, I had a 120-vote edge over Humphrey. I figured, well, we could always say that, for one brief moment, we led. I went out and spoke to the crowd, and they whooped and hollered. Back in our private room, I noticed Terry’s face had gone pale.
TERRY: As the results from different areas of the state started coming in, I got more scared. I kept hearing, so-and-so wants to interview you. All these security people surround you and drag you through this crush of people,