Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [56]
—Alternative Journalism Review, September 1999
Somewhere on the outskirts of Mexicali, we pass a marker noting that Ernesto Zedillo, President of Mexico from 1994 until 2000, spent most of his youth here. Terry and I had been in Mexico City on official business when Zedillo was still president, after Vicente Fox had just been elected. (By law, presidents in Mexico only serve a single six-year term.) It was the transition period, so I met with both men. I looked at Zedillo as a true statesman. Fox was the first man elected in ninety-some years who wasn’t part of the PRI party, and Zedillo could have made it very difficult for him. But he didn’t. He helped Fox completely, even though he took a lot of heat from his party for making the transition so smooth. Zedillo showed that the country of Mexico came first, before politics.
As Terry and I reminisced about Zedillo, it brought an incident from my own transition to mind. Arne Carlson, a moderate Republican, was the outgoing governor when I came into office. Four years earlier, when I’d ended my term as mayor of Brooklyn Park, Carlson had decided to honor me at his annual State of the State Address. While mayor, I’d managed to implement policies that helped a very high crime rate in Brooklyn Park drop dramatically. Carlson had personally taken me aside at his residence for a chat.
“Remember what he said to me that night, Terry? ‘We need people like you.’ He was practically begging me to reconsider and run again for mayor. I said, ‘Well, governor, I did my four years, and now I’m going back to the private sector.’”
“Well, in hindsight, I think that’s where he would have preferred you stayed,” Terry says.
“Yeah, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to remind him. When I met with him the morning after I won governor, I said, ‘Well, governor, you know you’re responsible for this.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, back in ’94 you took me aside after I stepped down as mayor and said government needed me and I shouldn’t be leaving. And I took that to heart!’ You’d have thought I said the worst thing in the world! His face flushed red with anger, and he totally ignored me!”
“Gee, I can’t understand why,” Terry says.
“It was sort of like my relationship with the Minnesota media. I always used to have to tell them—‘That’s a joke—joke—joke.’ I can’t help it if people don’t appreciate my humor!”
“Well, what Governor Carlson did to you after that wasn’t so funny.”
It was sad, but true. It used to be that, as a matter of courtesy, governors didn’t speak publicly about their successors. That unspoken rule was broken by Governor Carlson. He would never come out to support me, but was constantly going to the media with his criticisms. Since I left, I haven’t said one word about the current governor. I consider that part of the dignity of having held the office.
You think about transitions when you’re in a new one. The day after the election in 1998, when it had dawned on my “kitchen cabinet” and me that we were completely clueless as to what to do next, I can’t remember who broke the ice first. Our entire focus had been on winning the election and, by necessity, we couldn’t look beyond that. But nobody in the Independence Party had ever held a statelevel job. If anybody had held one locally, it was as a councilperson in a rural suburb somewhere. And here we were: in a matter of two months we needed to be up-to-speed and running the state of Minnesota. And not embarrass ourselves in the process—because the people had entrusted me with this responsibility.
By late afternoon, we’d all been sitting there for about three hours without getting anything much accomplished. We did