Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [96]
In a timeless place like Conception Bay, words like those call up a lot of food for thought. I’ve never spoken publicly about why I didn’t run for a second term as governor. Ultimately, it had to do with my family, especially Terry’s health. There were other factors, too. Times of painful realizations. The first of these happened not long after September 11.
Headline: 28,000 State Workers Strike in Minnesota, Drawing Fire
Nearly 28,000 Minnesota state employees walked off the job today in a demand for higher pay, drawing criticism from many Minnesotans, who said the strikers were acting selfishly at a time of national crisis.
—The New York Times, October 2, 2001
I’d offered them a slight pay raise and an extension of benefits—these things get negotiated every two years—and still they walked out. I had to assign National Guard troops to fill in for them at more than a hundred state hospitals, nursing homes, and veterans homes. The strike hurt me deeply. We didn’t know if more terrorist attacks might be looming. In my view, the United States was at war. Going out on strike was their patriotic response? For a dollar-an-hour pay increase, at a moment like this, after the biggest attack on American soil in our history? I felt their concern for their pocketbooks potentially disrupted my ability to govern.
When I’d taken office almost three years before, Steven Bosacker, my chief of staff, scheduled me to pay visits to each of the twenty-five departments in the state. That’s all I did for my first two weeks. When I’d walk in, I had state workers come up to me and say, “I’ve been working here thirty years and this is the first time a governor has ever set foot in this building.” So I thought I really had a rapport with these employees. For them to strike now felt like a stab in the back.
I know how strongly the Democrats control the unions and, although I have no proof, in my heart I blame them for the strike. One time when I went to broadcast my weekly radio show, I was greeted by a hundred workers, and I’ll never forget the signs some of them held up: “Jesse ‘the Scab’ Ventura.” I found this personally degrading and offensive.
The strike got settled and everyone went back to work by the middle of October. But that day of the picket signs was when I’d turned to Terry and said, “Honey, I don’t think I want to be their boss anymore.”
The Minnesota unions had also torn me apart for leaving the state and making the twenty-four-hour trip to Ground Zero while the strike was still on. The Minnesota media were furious, too, because they weren’t allowed to come along when Terry and I went to the Twin Towers site. That wasn’t my call, it was Governor Pataki’s. He felt it was too dangerous. With a lot of heavy equipment and workers risking their lives, you needed to minimize the presence of cameras. But by that point, my relationship with the media had already sunk below the horizon.
I had a radio show every Friday called Lunch with the Governor. I did that so I could speak directly to the people of Minnesota, without the press always as the intermediary. It was more than my having an adverse relationship with them. Never once was I criticized over policy. It was always personal—what Jesse said, how Jesse reacted. Which, in terms of the popularity game, might have been “powerful stuff”—but it was meaningless in terms of what I was trying to accomplish in the big picture.
Let me tell you about a double standard, in terms of how I was treated. Soon after I took office, I wrote my autobiography. It became a bestseller. I was immediately assailed by the Minnesota press for supposedly using my victory to make money. A huge effort was made to convince the public that I was nothing but a profiteer. Then,