Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [125]
Because—in fact, we had a first-time elected representative in Minnesota who quit after the two-year term. And her quote to the news media was, “I got tired of checking my conscience in at the door.”
—CNN, September 20, 2000
At the time of his election, Abraham Lincoln was a member of a relatively new third party called the Republicans. He won the presidency with only 39 percent of the vote, and he wasn’t even on the ballot in many states. I guess all the Republicans have forgotten that today, now that they’re the status quo. But, logically, aren’t we going in the wrong direction? If this country had three legitimate parties back in Lincoln’s time, and when you consider how large our population is compared to pre-Civil War days, we ought to have five parties, instead of two.
I did Larry King Live once with Alan Simpson, the senator from Wyoming. He was expounding about how well the two-party system had served us all these years. I sat there quietly. Finally Larry turned to me and said, “Governor, you’re a member of a third party, what do you think of the two-party system?” I said, “Larry, I think the two-party system is phenomenal. After all, it gives us one more choice than Communist Russia had.” Simpson couldn’t seem to come up with a response to that.
Saddam Hussein had an election a couple of years before we invaded Iraq, where he was the only candidate. Imagine, in America we give you one more! Today, if they adopted our system of democracy verbatim in Iraq, like we keep saying we want, it’s doomed to fail. Because Iraq already has three parties—the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds.
I like to quote the late great Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who said, “If you’re made to pick the lesser of two evils, it means you’re still pickin’ evil.” Or this perspective, which I must admit I stole in part from Pat Buchanan: It’s like going into the grocery store and the only choices in the soft drink department are Coke and Pepsi. Depending on your taste buds, one is slightly sweeter than the other—but they’re both colas!
We’ve actually had numerous third parties in the history of our republic, everything from the Anti-Masonics to the Know-Nothings to the Populists and Progressives, on up to the Dixiecrats and the Libertarians. In my lifetime alone, I’ve seen a number of them come and go. In the early 1970s, George Wallace was a third-party candidate. In the early 1980s, along came John Anderson. In the 1990s, there was Ross Perot. And, of course, Ralph Nader in the 2000s.
I’ve always advocated that anyone qualified, who so desires, can run for office. For people who say it’s Nader’s fault that Bush got elected, I say that’s baloney. You’re not picking the winner of a horse race. People voted for Nader because they wanted him to become president. When we start saying that someone like Nader shouldn’t run because he’ll take votes away from a Democrat or a Republican, then that’s not a democracy either. Free elections mean voting your heart and your conscience.
Besides, didn’t Nader bring up a lot of topics that the other two candidates wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole? I respect Nader; he’s a very intelligent and very interesting man. He’s done the best he can to hold up the banner, but he also carries a certain left-wing stigma, and he’s only going to go so far. At least he’s out there saying some real things.
I was never able to make as much political hay out of this as I wanted, but here is how the deck gets stacked in Minnesota. State taxpayer money pays for the entire staffs of the Democratic and Republican caucuses. Those are the people who put out the propaganda, do all the political dirty work. Yet my independent party doesn’t receive any such funds, and we’re talking about millions of dollars. When I came in as governor and found out this situation existed, I talked about it to the press. Well, the response basically was, how