Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  When Congress needed only one United States senator to sign on, in order to mount an investigation into what happened in Florida, nobody would do it. Why? Who got to them? I always wondered why Paul Wellstone, who many times would be the lone dissenter on a 99-to-1 vote, wouldn’t have been eager to do it—rather than have this stigma hanging over our elections from then on.

  My biggest beef about the 2000 election, though, was this: Half a million more Americans voted for Al Gore to be President. In any other election in America, if you get the most votes, you win. How can we continue to justify a concept that, when it comes to presidential elections, you can win the popular vote and lose? This shows that the electoral college is a controlled, elitist system. It was set up when the elected officials were still riding on horseback to Washington. Today, when you can communicate on the Internet with someone in Beijing, China, why still hang onto something that’s completely irrelevant?

  What I wanted to see happen in 2004 was the exact opposite result of 2000. I wanted Bush to win the popular election and John Kerry to have the most votes in the electoral college. Then maybe these two groups of elitists would get together and say, it’s time to get rid of the electoral college. If I ever became president, that would be one of my top priorities. The Maryland Legislature has already voted to bypass the electoral college—providing enough other states do the same.

  The electronic voting machines are a disaster, too. There is strong evidence that Ohio and possibly some other states went for Bush in 2004 only because somebody tampered with these machines. What astounds me is that they don’t provide any paper trail. You wouldn’t go to an ATM machine that didn’t offer you a receipt. Whether you want to keep it or not is your choice, but you still have a right to push the button and get one. But not with these new voting machines. No receipts! How can you have an election where there is no mechanism for a recount? All you hear about today are computer viruses, but we’re basing more and more of our entire election system on computers that can be hacked into—with no means of detecting it!

  The results of our first two presidential elections in this century have been, to say the least, questionable. I laugh when I hear the United States accuse other countries of voter fraud. Shouldn’t we clean up our backyard before we point fingers at anyone else? I mean, look what happened in Ohio, where a federal judge had ordered all the ballots preserved from the questionable 2004 election. Well, the boards of elections in fifty-six of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties either lost, shredded, or dumped nearly 1.6 million ballot and election records. Gee, they fell victim to spilled coffee, a flooded storage area, little things like that.

  Besides computer scams and other methods of vote stealing, I think our elections are fraudulent today simply in how the system operates. Campaign finance “reform,” that so-called bipartisan McCain-Feingold bill, is a sham. The two parties simply found loopholes and started cheating the very first year. Another of the bigger factors in why I didn’t run for governor again is because I find the raising of money so despicable. My parents taught me that you work for what you earn. In contemporary politics, it’s come down to panhandling. You attend the right fundraisers and you glad-hand people and, in return, they write you checks.

  I cringe when I hear how many millions the 2008 presidential candidates have raised in campaign contributions. As of the end of October ’07, the eight Democrats have raked in more than $244 million, and the ten Republicans another $175 million! We’re supposed to believe that these donors aren’t buying future favors? Interestingly, the top five American arms manufacturers are now giving more to Democrats than Republicans. Their favorite happens to be Hillary Clinton, who is also being backed by Wall Street.

  I saw in the paper a couple of stories juxtaposed on the same page that I found quite ironic. One was about Minneapolis starting a crackdown on panhandlers. The other was about a heavyweight politician coming to town for a fundraiser. I called a local radio station and left a message saying I found it hard to distinguish between the two.

  I’m not big on socialism, but maybe it’s time we limited the campaign money to one publicly funded source so that every candidate’s share is equal. If that’s unconstitutional, then why not remove all limits and go to full disclosure? At least that way, you know who is buying the influence.

  All that politicians do, at least in the House of Representatives, is look to the next election two years down the road. If you’re a rookie congressman, you spend your first year getting oriented to Washington. The second year, you spend campaigning to come back again. Let’s say you win reelection. You then spend one year when you can finally go to work, but you’ve got to be back on the campaign trail after that. Three of the four years are rendered non-productive, or certainly not as productive as they could be. So why do we continue with two-year election cycles? Why not go to four-year or even six-year terms in the House, like they have in the Senate?

  I tried to do something about this situation on a state level. This was based on my experience running for governor. Remember, I was the private sector guy. The other two were already coming from jobs in public life, as a mayor and a state attorney general. How come I had to leave my job and not get paid for six months while, at the same time, they held onto their jobs (and their paychecks)—which they weren’t even doing because they were busy running for another job!

  I wondered why we allowed them to do that, using our tax dollars. Imagine if you worked for somebody in a private company and told the boss, “I’m going to spend the next six months trying to get this other job, so I won’t be here for you. But I still want you to pay me while I’m out job-hunting.” So I tried to get a bill passed making it illegal for seated politicians to campaign Monday through Friday between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., at times when they are supposed to be working. I couldn’t even get anybody to carry the bill into the legislature.

  What the public needs to understand is, if you want honest government today, there need to be wholesale mega-changes in the way it runs. You don’t change it by electing different people to go into the same system. The two political parties are so out for their own power that the people are nothing but pawns in their chess game.

  Headline: LARRY KING LIVE: DOES JESSE VENTURA ‘STAND ALONE’?

  KING: Who are political pawns?

  VENTURA: Political pawns to me are the two parties, because I find, Larry, that most elected officials, especially at the state level, come in with an attitude they want to do a good job, they want to represent their constituents, and do all the right things. And then they get there, they get involved in the two-party system that we have today and they become political pawns.

  Because—in fact, we had a first-time elected representative in Minnesota who quit after the two-year term. And her quote to the news media was, “I got tired of checking my conscience in at the door.”

  —CNN, September 20, 2000

  At the time of his election, Abraham Lincoln was a member of a relatively new third party called the Republicans. He won the presidency with only 39 percent of the vote, and he wasn’t even on the ballot in many states. I guess all the Republicans have forgotten that today, now that they’re the status quo. But, logically, aren’t we going in the wrong direction? If this country had three legitimate parties back in Lincoln’s time, and when you consider how large our population is compared to pre-Civil War days, we ought to have five parties, instead of two.

  I did Larry King Live once with Alan Simpson, the senator from Wyoming. He was expounding about how well the two-party system had served us all these years. I sat there quietly. Finally Larry turned to me and said, “Governor, you’re a member of a third party, what do you think of the two-party system?” I said, “Larry, I think the two-party system is phenomenal. After all, it gives us one more choice than Communist Russia had.” Simpson couldn’t seem to come up with a response to that.

  Saddam Hussein had an election a couple of years before we invaded Iraq, where he was the only candidate.
Imagine, in America we give you one more! Today, if they adopted our system of democracy verbatim in Iraq, like we keep saying we want, it’s doomed to fail. Because Iraq already has three parties—the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds.

  I like to quote the late great Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who said, “If you’re made to pick the lesser of two evils, it means you’re still pickin’ evil.” Or this perspective, which I must admit I stole in part from Pat Buchanan: It’s like going into the grocery store and the only choices in the soft drink department are Coke and Pepsi. Depending on your taste buds, one is slightly sweeter than the other—but they’re both colas!

  We’ve actually had numerous third parties in the history of our republic, everything from the Anti-Masonics to the Know-Nothings to the Populists and Progressives, on up to the Dixiecrats and the Libertarians. In my lifetime alone, I’ve seen a number of them come and go. In the early 1970s, George Wallace was a third-party candidate. In the early 1980s, along came John Anderson. In the 1990s, there was Ross Perot. And, of course, Ralph Nader in the 2000s.

  I’ve always advocated that anyone qualified, who so desires, can run for office. For people who say it’s Nader’s fault that Bush got elected, I say that’s baloney. You’re not picking the winner of a horse race. People voted for Nader because they wanted him to become president. When we start saying that someone like Nader shouldn’t run because he’ll take votes away from a Democrat or a Republican, then that’s not a democracy either. Free elections mean voting your heart and your conscience.

  Besides, didn’t Nader bring up a lot of topics that the other two candidates wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole? I respect Nader; he’s a very intelligent and very interesting man. He’s done the best he can to hold up the banner, but he also carries a certain left-wing stigma, and he’s only going to go so far. At least he’s out there saying some real things.

  I was never able to make as much political hay out of this as I wanted, but here is how the deck gets stacked in Minnesota. State taxpayer money pays for the entire staffs of the Democratic and Republican caucuses. Those are the people who put out the propaganda, do all the political dirty work. Yet my independent party doesn’t receive any such funds, and we’re talking about millions of dollars. When I came in as governor and found out this situation existed, I talked about it to the press. Well, the response basically was, how dare I even bring that up?

  The system locks out a third-party candidate in many ways. If you are running for a national office like the presidency, shouldn’t the criteria be the same in every state to earn a place on the ballot? You’d think so. But no, I would have to fulfill fifty different criteria in fifty different states. In some states, it’s so ridiculous that you must use a certain size and type of paper on which to gather your petition signatures. The number of signatures required, from state to state, is never the same, either.

  It was created this way by the two parties, in order to make an independent candidate jump through as many hoops as possible. Why do you think, oftentimes when Nader would achieve success in making it onto a state’s ballot, one of the parties would immediately file a challenge and tie it up in court until it was too late? Again I ask, is that the true meaning of democracy—filing suit to keep people from running for public office?

  Here’s what I would do. In a federal election, the same criteria should apply in every state, across the board. To get on the ballot, you would need to get an established number of signatures by a certain date—based on either a percentage of that state’s population, or simply a specific number like, maybe, 25,000. Besides that, you’d only need to meet the other existing qualifications: born in the United States, be at least thiry-five years old, and so on.

  The next rub is the presidential debates. First of all, we have to get the debates back into the hands of a neutral party. In 1992, when Ross Perot scared the pants off the two parties by getting almost 20 percent of the vote, that entitled him to nearly $30 million of our tax dollars if he chose to run again in ’96. Shouldn’t that entitlement—and the fact that he received one out of every five votes—also have automatically qualified Perot to take part in any ’96 debates?

  Well, that wasn’t allowed. Up until that point, all presidential debates had been under the jurisdiction of the League of Women Voters. In 1996, Congress took them away from the League and formed another bureaucratic layer of government, the Federal Debate Commission. It so happens that the commission’s members are not elected, but appointed, by the former heads of the Republican and Democratic national parties. In fact, two of the appointees were themselves the former heads of the two parties. They now determine who you get to hear in the debates.

  That year, it was Bill Clinton running for reelection against Bob Dole. Dole did not want Perot in the debates, because he felt it would erode his conservative base. Clinton did not want debates at all because he was so far ahead that debates could only bring his numbers down. So, the two of them made a backroom deal. They would eliminate Perot if Clinton was allowed to say how many debates there would be, and when. They took this to the Federal Debate Commission and, of course, it was rubber-stamped. That’s how we were denied seeing Perot take part in a spirited three-person debate. That year, the only two debates were held—by design—at the same time as the World Series.

  Now whether or not someone can participate in debates is based upon an arbitrary polling figure. You have to be polling nationally at 15 percent. If that criteria had been applied in Minnesota, I would not have become the governor. Because at the time of the primary, I was only polling at 10 percent. But I was allowed to debate, and I proved that you could be at 10 percent and still end up winning. And I did it in a mere eight weeks.

  We all know that polls can be skewed. It’s all in how the questions get asked, in order to get whatever numbers they desire. Instead of the way they’ve rigged it, I think whether you’re allowed to debate ought to be based on whether yours qualifies as a major party. If a candidate has achieved 5 percent of the vote at a national level, that would confer major-party status and entitle him or her to be part of the debates.

  The way it works instead? Let me draw an analogy to playing football: The two parties get to change the rules at halftime if they desire. And the rules are, indeed, constantly changing, to benefit their team. Let’s say you come to play the Democrats or Republicans, and you happen to have a great running game. They say, okay, you are allowed to run the ball once out of every four plays—but on the other three downs, you’ve got to pass. The rules are orchestrated to put you on the road to defeat, where it would take next to a miracle to win.

  Allow me one more history lesson. For over two hundred years, America’s third parties have promoted concepts and policies that eventually became crucial parts of our social and political lives. Women’s right to vote, child labor laws, the forty-hour work week, unemployment insurance, the Social Security Act, and “getting tough on crime”—all these ideas were first put forward by third-party candidates.

  Just because there is so much against us doesn’t mean we’re not effective. Because the two parties want us to disappear so badly, they will generally focus on what brought us in. In that way, a third party can carry the agenda. Remember Ross Perot, with his pie chart and his message about the deficit and balancing the budget? That’s what Clinton and his opponents wound up putting at the top of their list. They wanted to prove to the people that you don’t need a third party; we can take care of this problem.

  Is it hopeless for an independent to get anywhere at this point? I don’t think so, because, at a state level, both Angus King and I have won governor’s races. It’s interesting that Minnesota and Maine traditionally lead the nation in voter turnout—and those are the two states that have recently elected independent governors.

  Angus and I used to have a lot of fun at the National Governors Association meetings in Washington. On the second day, when the two parties have their big caucuses in separate buildings, that kind
of left poor Angus and me out in the cold. So we would take a very casual, beautiful walk down Constitution Avenue, sit down together on a park bench, and talk about our most important issues. I’d achieved so much notoriety that we had most everybody in the press corps following along. “Welcome to the Independent Governors Caucus,” we told them. It was hilarious.

  As Angus neared the end of his second term, the media kept asking him, “Governor, what’s it going to be now, the House or the Senate?” Finally, one day, he told them, “I’m going home. I’ve spent eight years not doing some things that need to be done there.” And he walked away. The media in Maine were as baffled as when I did the same thing in Minnesota.

  Angus is a brilliant man, and an honest one. If I ever did go for president, I’d sure love to talk Angus King out of retirement to run with me.

  We proved that it can be done. It just takes the right circumstances and, for lack of a better phrase, you’ve got to catch the opposition with their pants down. You’ve got to sneak up on them. You’ve got to make them think you’re insignificant, not worth bothering about. You have to bring out their natural arrogance, figuring that everything is under control.

  I was told that, some years later, Norm Coleman turned to a person I knew in the Republican Party when they were out to dinner one night, shook his head, and said, “What the hell did happen in ’98?” I caught them off guard. They never dreamed it could happen.

  I guess time will tell whether it could again.