Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [18]
It’s personal battles like this that got me involved in politics in the first place. I had no political intentions until I ran for mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, in 1990. I did it because I was outraged about developers coming into the area where we lived then, aiming to make housing subdivisions out of the few remaining potato fields. Rubber-stamped by the good old boys on the city council, they demanded that our neighborhood pay for curbs, gutters, and storm sewers through assessments—none of which we needed because we all already captured rain runoff in ditches. Where they planned to put the runoff water only added insult to injury: Since pollution laws forbade the developers from draining it into the Mississippi, they decided to pump the polluted storm water into a beautiful wetland about a block from my house. This would have completely destroyed the wetland.
It was supposed to be a nonpartisan election, meaning there are no parties, you run as who you are. But when it came down to the last week of the campaign, the heads of the state Democratic and Republican parties came together and wrote a joint letter to every citizen in Brooklyn Park, urging them to vote for the twenty-five-year incumbent. They called me “the most dangerous man in the city.” For a moment I took offense at that, but then I thought, well, as a professional wrestler and a Navy SEAL, they might be telling the truth here.
Anyway, I won, 65 percent to 35 percent, taking all twenty-four precincts of the city, including the one the incumbent lived in. A few weeks after the election, both parties independently came courting me to join them. I said, “But why would you want the most dangerous man in the city? Three weeks ago, you thought I was horrible. Now you’re welcoming me with open arms. You know what? I got elected pretty substantially on my own, so please explain why I would need you now.”
TERRY: I’d campaigned for him when he was running for mayor. Back then I thought politics was a really grand and noble thing to do. And I found out quickly, in the little town of Brooklyn Park, that it’s just dog-eat-dog, and stab everybody in the back. After he got elected, suddenly all these politicians were treating us like the best thing since sliced bread. It just seemed like everything was so underhanded and deceitful and dishonest. It was about who has power, who gets money, and what makes one side win.
Early in 1992, I began seeing these signs in people’s yards: “Independence Party—Dean Barkley for Congress.” I decided to check it out. Many of the people involved were centrists like me, disgruntled Democrats or Republicans who couldn’t stand what the two parties had turned into. The Independence Party of Minnesota wasn’t a wing like the Libertarians, who tend to want anarchy, or the Green Party, which was too far left to be my cup of tea. The Independence folks were all very passionate. It wasn’t about money, but about ideas. It wasn’t about power and control, but about the Constitution and “we the people,” and what government should be, in my opinion. And their charter stated unequivocally that, within the Independence Party, you only had to agree on 70 percent of the issues. That meant, if they could handle it, pro-choice and pro-life people could both be part of it; they could actually coexist with each other around other important issues.
So I affiliated with the Independence Party, which is where I met Dean Barkley and Doug Friedline and all of the people who eventually worked on my campaign for governor. Dean was a lawyer and small businessman who got inspired by Ross Perot’s third-party presidential campaign and decided to run for Congress. With a blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, Dean gathered a healthy 16 percent of the vote in 1992.
Dean really is the hero of the third-party movement in Minnesota, more so than I am. He paved the way, and made my