Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  It’s personal battles like this that got me involved in politics in the first place. I had no political intentions until I ran for mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, in 1990. I did it because I was outraged about developers coming into the area where we lived then, aiming to make housing subdivisions out of the few remaining potato fields. Rubber-stamped by the good old boys on the city council, they demanded that our neighborhood pay for curbs, gutters, and storm sewers through assessments—none of which we needed because we all already captured rain runoff in ditches. Where they planned to put the runoff water only added insult to injury: Since pollution laws forbade the developers from draining it into the Mississippi, they decided to pump the polluted storm water into a beautiful wetland about a block from my house. This would have completely destroyed the wetland.

  It was supposed to be a nonpartisan election, meaning there are no parties, you run as who you are. But when it came down to the last week of the campaign, the heads of the state Democratic and Republican parties came together and wrote a joint letter to every citizen in Brooklyn Park, urging them to vote for the twenty-five-year incumbent. They called me “the most dangerous man in the city.” For a moment I took offense at that, but then I thought, well, as a professional wrestler and a Navy SEAL, they might be telling the truth here.

  Anyway, I won, 65 percent to 35 percent, taking all twenty-four precincts of the city, including the one the incumbent lived in. A few weeks after the election, both parties independently came courting me to join them. I said, “But why would you want the most dangerous man in the city? Three weeks ago, you thought I was horrible. Now you’re welcoming me with open arms. You know what? I got elected pretty substantially on my own, so please explain why I would need you now.”

  TERRY: I’d campaigned for him when he was running for mayor. Back then I thought politics was a really grand and noble thing to do. And I found out quickly, in the little town of Brooklyn Park, that it’s just dog-eat-dog, and stab everybody in the back. After he got elected, suddenly all these politicians were treating us like the best thing since sliced bread. It just seemed like everything was so underhanded and deceitful and dishonest. It was about who has power, who gets money, and what makes one side win.

  Early in 1992, I began seeing these signs in people’s yards: “Independence Party—Dean Barkley for Congress.” I decided to check it out. Many of the people involved were centrists like me, disgruntled Democrats or Republicans who couldn’t stand what the two parties had turned into. The Independence Party of Minnesota wasn’t a wing like the Libertarians, who tend to want anarchy, or the Green Party, which was too far left to be my cup of tea. The Independence folks were all very passionate. It wasn’t about money, but about ideas. It wasn’t about power and control, but about the Constitution and “we the people,” and what government should be, in my opinion. And their charter stated unequivocally that, within the Independence Party, you only had to agree on 70 percent of the issues. That meant, if they could handle it, pro-choice and pro-life people could both be part of it; they could actually coexist with each other around other important issues.

  So I affiliated with the Independence Party, which is where I met Dean Barkley and Doug Friedline and all of the people who eventually worked on my campaign for governor. Dean was a lawyer and small businessman who got inspired by Ross Perot’s third-party presidential campaign and decided to run for Congress. With a blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, Dean gathered a healthy 16 percent of the vote in 1992.

  Dean really is the hero of the third-party movement in Minnesota, more so than I am. He paved the way, and made my victory possible. In 1994, he ran for the U.S. Senate and got more than 5 percent of the vote, just the amount you need to achieve major party status under Minnesota law. That was my final year as mayor. I started working for talk radio, and had no inclinations for any further life in politics.

  But in 1996, Dean decided to try for the Senate again and I agreed to become honorary chair of his campaign. His hometown of Annandale, Minnesota, is only eight miles away from my summer lake cabin. I was going to be up there over the Fourth of July anyway, and Dean asked me if I’d walk with him in the Annandale parade, because everyone knew me as the pro wrestler who’d served a term as mayor. As we started down Main Street in this little Midwestern town, all of a sudden the whole crowd started chanting: “Jesse! Jesse!”

  Dean, smiling, leaned over to me and said, “See? The wrong candidate is running.” I smiled back at Dean and made what I thought was a joke. “Dean, I don’t want to go to Washington, but I’ll tell you what—I’ll run for governor of the state of Minnesota.”

  Unfortunately or fortunately, whatever shoe you want to wear, Dean didn’t forget what I’d said off-the-cuff that day in the parade. He kept the pressure on me and, two years later, he’d be my campaign chair. My running was really thanks to Dean, who retained our major party status by getting 7 percent of the vote in 1996.

  At the time I was doing a radio show called “Sports Talk,” but I couldn’t do just sports for three hours. What are you going to do, dissect every single statistic of last night’s basketball game? So I would always devote an hour to politics, because it was natural for me. Besides, politics are in sports; they’re in everything.

  Minnesota had just seen its first major budget surplus—and they spent it, about $4 billion! The governor and the legislature didn’t care one iota. They had all this extra money and, by God, they could fund all these pet projects they’d dreamed of—they were like kids in a candy store. I started explaining to people over the radio how this represented overtaxation. I spoke about how, in Minnesota, you do a two-year budget. Now, because the tax system was bringing them more money than they’d budgeted for since the economy was so strong, I felt that money ought to be returned to the people. Let’s remember also that state budgets, by law, do not run on deficit like the federal government. If you had a situation where you applied that additional money to a debt, maybe I could have lived with it more. As it was, I started complaining vehemently on the air about how wrong our supposed leaders were for doing this. After all, this is our money!

  Then, again in passing, I started stating that maybe I should run for governor. Well, it caught on like wildfire with many of the listeners. It got to where I felt I’d boxed myself into a corner—if I didn’t attempt to do this, I would lose my credibility. And in the world of talk radio, once that happens, you’re finished.

  In the rural hinterlands of Kansas, the emptiness is enveloped by a vast, cloud-filled sky, Terry and I glimpse an old stone barn over the horizon and simultaneously think back to the afternoon that I invited Barkley and Friedline out to our ranch. It was September 1997, a little over a year before the next election. By then, we’d affiliated our independent state party with the national Reform Party that Ross Perot had begun. I told Dean I’d like to see if a citizen could become governor, instead of somebody who’s worked their way up through the two-party system by holding various offices until they’re basically hand-picked. I asked what he thought it would cost, and he figured at least $400,000, to make a credible run. We talked about all the turned-off voters we wanted to reach.

  Finally I said, “I think I want to give it a shot. But I’m the easy sell. Now we’ve got to go out to the barn and convince Terry.”

  She had a pitchfork in her hand. She looked at Dean and said, “You’d have to clean the barn barefoot before I’d ever say yes to this.”

  I stop reminiscing to ask Terry if she remembered that.

  “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, Jes
se’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 election in more than half a century. The Minneapolis Star Tribune didn’t bother putting a full-time reporter on my campaign. When the big East Coast papers came out to cover the race, I wasn’t even mentioned. Their stories focused on “My Three Sons,” the boys raised by Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, and Walter Mondale who were squaring off for the nomination in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary.

  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 the moderator finally let me get a word in, I said, “I figure this obviously shows who’s above all this.” Everybody in the room laughed.

  I suited up for the final debates. A navy-blue suit with a diamond-patterned tie and a white button-down shirt that Terry starched. The primaries were over, and it had come down to just Humphrey, Coleman, and me. The candidates were asked if they were behind a government plan to support various economic development projects. Both of them thought this was very important. I said I didn’t know a thing about it, but nowhere in the Constitution did it describe government’s business being to create jobs. To me, that was the responsibility of the private sector. Coleman called my response absu
rd “and actually very frightening.” But the audience went wild with applause.

  Later, I was driving home, thinking about my Republican opponent. Norm Coleman was so polished. For one fleeting moment I said to myself, “This guy is beyond me. I can’t possibly compete with him.” Then it dawned on me a few minutes later that I didn’t want to be like him. There are thousands of Norm Coleman wannabes out there, who’ve all been to Political Science 101 class on how to get elected. They’re so predictable. If you were only allowed a three-minute stage to give your response, I wouldn’t take up that time with double-talk rhetoric. We all know what that is—when the candidate is done, you turn to the person next to you and ask, “What did he say? He wasn’t answering the question!” I gave truthful, simple answers. And it seemed to work.

  Sometimes, of course, speaking my mind proved a bit controversial. I told the veterans gathered at an American Legion post that I opposed any constitutional amendment to outlaw flag-burning. The point was that we have the freedom to do something like that in America, and the flag is only a symbol. Besides, I told them, flagburners usually get the crap kicked out of them by construction workers, anyhow.

  Another time I got asked whether I favored legalizing prostitution. I replied no, but it was legal in Nevada, and they didn’t seem to have any huge problems with it. So I’d rather imprison the people who really deserve it. Besides, isn’t it easier to control something when it’s legal? I mean, why not put all the porno shops in one place? My opponents responded that such remarks ought to outrage and frighten the good people of Minnesota, and the media made a big deal out of attacking me, too. (Not one newspaper in the state endorsed my candidacy.) I guess they figured I was self-destructing but, somehow, my popularity kept building.

  At the same time, my campaign was just about flat broke. In Minnesota, there’s a system where you check off some money on your taxes to go into a general fund that gets distributed to candidates for office. My two opponents were entitled to a larger percentage, but I was supposed to be allotted more than $325,000 in campaign financing. However, to get the funds, you first had to procure a loan from a bank. Then, after the election, the government would repay the bank. The only stipulation was that you had to get at least five percent of the vote and, by the time of the primary, I was already polling at ten percent.