Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [21]
Sure enough, by early February, those candidates had already raised more than a million dollars. I’d received a little over a thousand. In the spring, I briefly resumed an acting career that had started ten years before when I played Blain alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator. This time, I was cast in an independent film being made in Minnesota. It was called 20/20 Vision and I played Buddy “One-Arm” Sanchez, a disturbed marriage counselor who goes nuts at the end and becomes violent. I hoped this wouldn’t get aired over the next few months.
That June, when the Reform Party held its convention at my alma mater—North Hennepin Community College—I told the 109 delegates not to worry about the polls. My opponents’ numbers could only go down, and mine could only go up. “Fifty percent of Minnesotans don’t vote!” I told them. “That’s disgusting!” Those were the people we had to tap into.
My talk radio job was still my main source of income, and I tried to convince the bosses at KFAN to let me stay on the air at least until the primaries in mid-September. But they were afraid of retribution from the Federal Communications Commission. So the day I formally filed as a candidate, July 21, was my last morning at the station. I didn’t think that was fair. Here the professional politicians could continue being paid their salaries. How come they didn’t take an unpaid leave of absence to run for office?
Things started to get interesting at the State Fair in August, when people took almost 50,000 of the Ventura/Schunk brochures and bought $26,000 worth of my “Retaliate in ’98” T-shirts. “I don’t care if a bill is Democrat or Republican,” I said to folks. “If it’s good for Minnesota, I’ll sign it. If it’s bad, I’ll veto it.” The polls showed my support to be growing, even though, by late August, I’d only raised a little over $60,000. The Republican candidate, Norm Coleman, now had $1.4 million, and the two leading Democratic contenders almost as much, between them.
At the Governor’s Economic Summit, in the middle of September, I wasn’t invited to speak. But Roger Moe, who was running for lieutenant governor with Skip Humphrey, graciously gave half his time to me. Everybody else was wearing suits and ties. I had on black Levi’s, a camouflage shirt, boots, and an Australian outback hat not unlike the one I’d worn in Predator. “You’re going to find me a little different,” I said to the audience seated around tables with white linen and flowers. “If the thought process were the same as it is today 150 years ago in this country,” I went on, “you would not have had Abraham Lincoln up here to talk to you. Because Abraham Lincoln was a third-party candidate. At that point in time the Republicans were the growing, new party.”
For the first gubernatorial debate, I wore a sport coat over a golf shirt, and my sneakers. I was always casual. There were something like four Democrats and four Republicans still in the running. I was sitting at the end of the table, since they had us in alphabetical order and Ventura came last. I looked around and every other candidate had stacks of books, spin documents; you can’t imagine all the paper. I had nothing. A lady came over and sat down, brought out a legal pad and pen, and started to hand them to me.
“What’s that for?” I said.
“Don’t you think you’ll need these?” she asked.
I said, “No.”
She said, “Really? Why not?”
I passed the pad and pen back and said, “Because, ma’am, when you tell the truth, you don’t have to have a good memory.” She sat there a moment, then smiled and said, “I understand.”
During the final debates, Humphrey and Coleman were at each other’s throats about family farmers. When