Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [36]
“Well, that’s a little hard to fathom,” Terry responds.
“Yeah, but it’s true, honey,” I tell her.
She’s got her camera trained on me again, and I don’t like it. “Turn that off, it’s distracting,” I continue.
“Here I am trying to do a video diary,” Terry says, exasperated. “You’ve been in front of cameras your whole life, saying the most outrageous things! But now, whenever I try to get you talking about something, you’re all of a sudden camera shy?!”
“It’s just that I know it’ll be aired in front of the family,” I admit. “I don’t like them having any ammunition on me.”
“Oh, wow,” she says, then pretends to be filming out the window while she hatches a secret plan on how to catch me candid again.
“Do you ever wonder,” Terry goes on, “what ever happened to that other Texas politician?”
“LBJ? He’s dead.”
“No, no, I know that! I’m talking about Ross Perot.”
Terry knows how to get me going.
In 1996, two years before I was elected governor, the Independence Party of Minnesota had affiliated with the Texas Reform Party that Henry Ross Perot had formed the year before, because we saw in him a chance to go national. By God, this Texas billionaire seemed committed, with the finances and the organization and the passion. I viewed him as a great hope for this country, even after the debacle of the 1992 election, where at one point he actually led in the polls. Then, all of a sudden, he withdrew from the race, claiming that Republican operatives had attempted to disrupt his daughter’s wedding and he wanted to spare her from further embarrassment. Perot changed his mind in October and started running again, but he’d lost two crucial months. Even so, he’d ended up receiving about 19 percent of the popular vote, making him the most successful independent candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.
My theory is that Perot never really wanted to win, he just wanted to make a statement. And when he saw the momentum building for him that summer, he got scared that he might actually pull it off. Only Perot could really answer whether he secretly preferred working in his empire, but that’s what I suspect. Still, I did see this glimmer of hope for a legitimate third party—and then I watched it start to flicker out as fast as it had risen.
When different affiliates from third parties all around the country came together in 1996, three-time Colorado Governor Dick Lamm had joined the movement. He is a brilliant man, a savvy politician, a speaker of truth in many ways. Some of us had groomed Dick to get the Reform Party nomination in 1996. Perot would always hold the status of being its creator, but we felt this would show the party growing beyond him. But at the eleventh hour, the Perot forces undercut Lamm and put Perot up again as the candidate.
Right then and there, our group from Minnesota and a lot of other supporters started to question what was really going on. All of a sudden, our new national party was being labeled vindictive because we brought forth another possibility. Isn’t that what politics is supposed to be? Not a dictatorship. But apparently, Perot and his Texas group didn’t truly want to create a legitimate third-party movement. It was really about Ross Perot’s ego.
He won 8 percent of the popular vote in ’96, less than half of what he’d done in ’92, but still respectable for a third party. Let me tell you what happened when I needed his help during my run for governor two years later. It was the time when I was trying to secure a bank loan for the $325,000-plus in campaign financing that was due me, but getting stymied by the powers-that-be. Remember I mentioned that a half dozen banks had turned me down, until the little Franklin Avenue Bank came through?
Before that happened, I flew to Atlanta with some of my key people to meet with Perot. The law doesn’t say that the loaning bank can’t be from out of state. We figured Perot must know a bank in Texas; he probably even owned a few! We sat down for a meeting, told him what was going on—that we thought we could win this election but that the money was critical