Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [19]
But in 1996, Dean decided to try for the Senate again and I agreed to become honorary chair of his campaign. His hometown of Annandale, Minnesota, is only eight miles away from my summer lake cabin. I was going to be up there over the Fourth of July anyway, and Dean asked me if I’d walk with him in the Annandale parade, because everyone knew me as the pro wrestler who’d served a term as mayor. As we started down Main Street in this little Midwestern town, all of a sudden the whole crowd started chanting: “Jesse! Jesse!”
Dean, smiling, leaned over to me and said, “See? The wrong candidate is running.” I smiled back at Dean and made what I thought was a joke. “Dean, I don’t want to go to Washington, but I’ll tell you what—I’ll run for governor of the state of Minnesota.”
Unfortunately or fortunately, whatever shoe you want to wear, Dean didn’t forget what I’d said off-the-cuff that day in the parade. He kept the pressure on me and, two years later, he’d be my campaign chair. My running was really thanks to Dean, who retained our major party status by getting 7 percent of the vote in 1996.
At the time I was doing a radio show called “Sports Talk,” but I couldn’t do just sports for three hours. What are you going to do, dissect every single statistic of last night’s basketball game? So I would always devote an hour to politics, because it was natural for me. Besides, politics are in sports; they’re in everything.
Minnesota had just seen its first major budget surplus—and they spent it, about $4 billion! The governor and the legislature didn’t care one iota. They had all this extra money and, by God, they could fund all these pet projects they’d dreamed of—they were like kids in a candy store. I started explaining to people over the radio how this represented overtaxation. I spoke about how, in Minnesota, you do a two-year budget. Now, because the tax system was bringing them more money than they’d budgeted for since the economy was so strong, I felt that money ought to be returned to the people. Let’s remember also that state budgets, by law, do not run on deficit like the federal government. If you had a situation where you applied that additional money to a debt, maybe I could have lived with it more. As it was, I started complaining vehemently on the air about how wrong our supposed leaders were for doing this. After all, this is our money!
Then, again in passing, I started stating that maybe I should run for governor. Well, it caught on like wildfire with many of the listeners. It got to where I felt I’d boxed myself into a corner—if I didn’t attempt to do this, I would lose my credibility. And in the world of talk radio, once that happens, you’re finished.
In the rural hinterlands of Kansas, the emptiness is enveloped by a vast, cloud-filled sky, Terry and I glimpse an old stone barn over the horizon and simultaneously think back to the afternoon that I invited Barkley and Friedline out to our ranch. It was September 1997, a little over a year before the next election. By then, we’d affiliated our independent state party with the national Reform Party that Ross Perot had begun. I told Dean I’d like to see if a citizen could become governor, instead of somebody who’s worked their way up through the two-party system by holding various offices until they’re basically hand-picked. I asked what he thought it would cost, and he figured at least $400,000, to make a credible run. We talked about all the turned-off voters we wanted to reach.
Finally I said, “I think I want to give it a shot. But I’m the easy sell. Now we’ve got to go out to the barn and convince Terry.”
She had a pitchfork in her hand. She looked at Dean and said, “You’d have to clean the barn barefoot before I’d ever say yes to this.”
I stop reminiscing to