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Anyway, it didn’t happen. Now the two parties are already talking about who’s running in 2012. Excuse me, didn’t we just get through two years of this? Give us a break! How about passing a law that says you’re not allowed to begin campaigning until the year of the election? I think the majority of people in the country would be all for that! Also, like I said earlier in the book, if you hold one office and decide to run for another, how about making a law that you have to resign the one you’re holding? You shouldn’t have a different rulebook for the public sector—for something you’d never be allowed to do in the private one.

My decision about whether to run for the Senate in Minnesota against Norm Coleman and Al Franken was a much more difficult one to make. I seriously thought about it, and I was torn. Did I want to disrupt my whole life? Let me put it like this, so you truly understand how I feel: I’m a free spirit. For me, to decide to go to Washington would be the equivalent of someone knowingly violating their parole and then having to go back to jail to serve out their six-year sentence. That’s how much distaste I have for the leadership of this country and the Democrats and Republicans. I don’t even like those people, so why would I want to go hang with them for six years? However, my patriotism also entered into the picture—if not me, then who? I felt that Coleman and Franken were both very vulnerable, and I could have beat them.

The day before the filing deadline in the middle of July, I appeared on Larry King. I talked about the double standard that any third-party candidate faces and also about the polls showing that I’d have a strong chance of winning. I also talked about the way the media had attacked my son, with absolutely no justification, when I was governor. And about how my daughter was afraid the same thing might happen to her. So I did not want to put my family in that position again.

I did tell Larry there was only one way I might change my mind over the next twenty-four hours—and that was if God spoke to me. My brother called me after the show and said that was brilliant, because I’d left myself the only out that couldn’t be criticized. Nobody wants to question the existence of God, no matter how idiotic it might be, right? Well, later that night I looked at Larry’s Web site. It showed him with arms out and looking up to the heavens, saying something like, “God, if you’re listening, please call Jesse Ventura tonight to get him in the Senate race!” When I saw that, I rolled over and laughed. I loved Larry’s humor, and I think he was being sincere.

So I was still in a quandary. Half of me said to run, the other half said it’s not worth doing this again to yourself and your family. It was four o’clock the next afternoon and filing ended by five, and it was a half-hour drive. That’s when my wife Terry looked at me and said, “Well, you’ve always believed in fate and destiny, haven’t you?”

I said, “Yes.”

And she said, “Then why don’t you flip a coin?”

I looked at her for a moment and then said, “You’re right. We’ll let fate and destiny decide.”

So I grabbed a quarter. We have a very hard-carpeted floor where a coin will flip and land without any question over the outcome—it’s gonna be either heads or tails. I walked out into the middle of that floor, turned to Terry, and said, “Okay. Heads I run, tails I don’t.”

She said okay. I flipped the quarter up in the air and it came down tails.

I looked at her and said, “I’m not running, let’s move on.” If it had come down heads, I would’ve gotten in the car, drove downtown, and filed.

Then Terry was actually the weaker of the two of us. “You don’t want to make it two out of three?” she asked.

I said, “No, that’s worthless, it’s not fate and destiny then.”

My only further comment on the Senate race is what I hear on the street from people since the election, which ended in a deadlock between Franken and Coleman: “We wouldn’t be having this recount if you’d have run.” If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it twenty times. But I chew them out.