Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [20]
“Hey, we had a great thing going,” she reflects. “I had my horse business and my riding lesson business; I was finally in the black. I liked our life the way it was. It was quiet and it was good. I didn’t want our family exposed like that to public life.”
“And I agreed with you. But I also asked you, ‘If I don’t do it, who will?’”
TERRY: I could see the fire in his eyes. Remember when George W. Bush said he’s ‘The Decider?’ Well, Jesse’s ‘The Persuader.’ I understood how strongly he felt about this. If it meant that much to him—being married and loving him as I do—I didn’t see how I could stand in his way. This is a guy who didn’t like or know anything about farming, and yet he let me get the farm, and have horses, and he bailed hay with me. For better or for worse.
I told Terry, when I decided to run, that she would not be needed. I said, this has got nothing to do with you or the kids. I want to change politics and turn it into what it truly is, and that’s the business of running government. Your private life is your business. I went down to the Capitol on a cold January day and stood on the steps, by myself, and made the announcement. The first thing the media asked was, “Where’s your family?” I said to them, “What do they have to do with this?” The media didn’t appreciate that, but too bad. We weren’t off to a good start. And it would get a lot worse.
The unique thing about our campaign is that, while people might was have thought we were some big piece of machinery, it was totally fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. I remember being booked in parades where I would drive for four hours across the state, and get to some small town where the parade lasted all of ten minutes. And I was the only candidate dumb enough to go there.
You know how millionaires will use their money to run for public office. I told Doug and Dean from the very minute they approached me, “Look, I will not put one penny of my own into this.” In the end, I did. But in a way that I felt was honorable. The entire campaign year, I drove to every event in my own car and I paid for my own gas. I never charged it back to the party. So that was my contribution.
Everyone on my staff was unpaid except for Doug Friedline, and he only received a salary from the primary onward when he left his job to become my full-time campaign manager. My volunteer secretary, scheduler, and advance woman was Mavis Huddle, a sixty-four-year-old retired secretary from Brooklyn Park who walked around spryly with a cane. Barkley brought in his excampaign press secretary, Gerry Drewery, sixty-eight, a semi-retired PR consultant and part-time reporter for the Farmington Independent . I told the staff we had only one rule: this is going to be fun.
To me, ours was what a campaign should be. It wasn’t a campaign of money, but of ideals. A campaign of belief. I refused to take any corporate PAC money, and most of my individual contributions were for $50. We thought about money only because you need it to do certain things, like advertise on television, for legitimacy. When I found out that you could set up a website for about $45, that fit right into our budget. I didn’t even know how to send an e-mail, but I had an old Army vet named Phil Madsen who could design a great Internet site. Since I knew that education was big in the minds of voters, I decided to choose a schoolteacher, sixty-four-year-old Mae Schunk, for my running mate as lieutenant governor. Her top priority was improving the teacher-to-student ratio in Minnesota.
I enjoyed being out among the people, and I wasn’t bad with the one-liners like: “Elections and politics are pretty much like war without guns, and I’m pretty good at it.” One time, a reporter asked how fast my light-blue Porsche with the NAVY SEAL plates could go. I said, “You know that high stretch of road leaving town out of Two Harbors? I’ve had it up to 140 there.” It was true, but I only hoped that not too many cops were listening.
Nobody took me seriously at first. I mean, no third-party candidate had won a statewide