Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  I realized it was time to go.

  First, though, I approached Robert, who was also standing on the stairs, one more time. Again I urged him to go independent.

  “I am independent,” he said. “You should become a Democrat.”

  “I’d lose all my credibility!” I exclaimed.

  “We’ll keep talking about it,” Robert said.

  On my way out the door, he came over and gave me a big bear-hug, then walked us out to my car. I confided in him that I had a secret plan, for getting on the ballot in all fifty states. “Look, if you count when Bush’s father was vice president, we’ve had nothing but Bushes and Clintons around the White House since 1980. Twenty-seven years! That’s more like a monarchy than a democracy, don’t you think?”

  “I never thought of that,” Robert said.

  “And now, in 2008, I warn you—we could end up with Hillary and Jeb!” (This was before Jeb’s brother’s popularity plunged to an all-time low for a sitting president.) Robert shook his head. He stood on his front step and saluted, with a big grin on his face, as I drove away.

  Heading home that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. If Robert Kennedy, Jr., ever ran for president as a Democrat, it would be no surprise to anyone. Just another Kennedy going for the brass ring. But if, because he can’t stand what’s happened to politics today, he left the party and ran as an independent, it would—to borrow a phrase from Muhammad Ali—shock the world.

  For a minute, I thought about leaking it to the media. Jesse Ventura and Robert Kennedy, Jr., meeting in Mexico to talk about the fate of America. Then I thought better of it. I hoped I was right about this much: we’d each of us made a new friend.

  Headline: JESSE VENTURA CONSIDERING 2008 WHITE HOUSE RUN

  Refreshed from a semester as a visiting professor at Harvard University, former pro wrestler and Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura says he’s considering an independent run for the White House in 2008, although he acknowledges that being leader of the free world might be too confining for him.

  “That’s an issue with me. I love my freedom,” Ventura said in an interview with the Associated Press at his office at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. “The part that would bug me is I wouldn’t be able to get up in the night and drive to the 7-11 for a Slurpee, not without them blocking off the roads, welding the manhole covers shut, and everything else that goes along with it.”

  Ventura has not made a firm decision on a presidential run. He is weighing the concerns of his wife, Terry, who has told him she won’t go with him if he wins the White House. His solution: move the White House to Minnesota.

  —Associated Press, April 15, 2004

  TERRY: I’m all done with it. I won’t be the First Lady this time. I just can’t. If you do this, I’m staying secluded down here in Baja.

  JESSE: You say you won’t, but I know if push came to shove, you’d be right there. Besides, the problem is that when I come to visit, they’ll destroy the place with all the helicopters. I won’t be able to sneak down!

  TERRY: I notice you don’t even question whether or not you’ll win.

  JESSE: Once you become a legitimate candidate, you get Secret Service protection. And I don’t go into anything to lose.

  TERRY: Let me put it this way, I have no intention of being part of it, at all. I think I’d actually be more helpful to you if I wasn’t involved.

  JESSE: But you’ve softened on another point. You did admit that being vice president wouldn’t be so bad, then we could live where the Gores did by the big telescope.

  TERRY: Plus, then I’d get a chance to ride with the Washington, D.C. mounted park police.

  JESSE: If we could just find somebody to be top dog. . . . Well, that would ease things up for me; as vice president I could be the official guy at funerals. You can’t screw that up too bad.

  Taking the personal and family end out of the mix, seriously, honey, can I make a difference? That will be the ultimate question that I’ll ask myself. Am I just barking up a tree, or do I truly believe that my country needs me?

  It’s like there’s a war being waged inside myself. It’s also a war of my fighting to be content with simple things again. That’s a dilemma. Also, do I retire in my mid-fifties? I’m done? Well, my dad did it. He reached the minimum retirement age for the city of Minneapolis, took it, and never looked back. In hindsight, I think he was smart to do that. He could have stayed on and worked another ten years and gotten more money. But he retired at fifty-five—and died at eighty-three.

  TERRY: That’s the other thing I think about—what if we only have twenty years left, do we really want to take four, or even maybe eight, of those years and make ourselves insane?

  JESSE: You’d be open-minded enough to give me my shot. That’s all I can ask for. The other battle I have is with the warrior part of me—the part that says: where would I have been today, and what opportunities would I have gotten, had it not been for the forefathers? You can’t go through life waiting for the other guy to do it.

  TERRY: That’s what’s wrong with the country right now.

  JESSE: So my meeting with Vince is being arranged. I want one hour, just him and me alone in a room.

  Vince McMahon, Jr., and I go way back. I’d joined his World Wrestling Federation (WWF) back in 1985. Through many ups and downs between us over the years, I’ve always liked Vince. He’s been called wrestling’s P. T. Barnum, a simply amazing showman and entrepreneur. When I was governor, he brought SummerSlam to the Target Center, and had me be the guest referee. Later, when I was teaching at Harvard, he inducted me into the Wrestling Hall of Fame. Today Vince is chairman of the board of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).

  He’s also very involved with politics. His interest began around the time I became governor of Minnesota. In July 2000, he founded WWE’s Smackdown Your Vote!, a nonpartisan approach to getting young people involved in the process and registered to vote. WWE began collaborating with many other nonprofits like Rock the Vote, the Youth Vote Coalition, and the League of Women Voters. In 2003, Vince’s group joined forces with Russell Simmons’ Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, in an effort to get “Two Million More by 2004.” They had a big impact.

  Vince told me, after I won governor, “If you ever go for president, I’ll back you 100 percent, with everything I’ve got.” Now we’ll see if he wants to play the game.

  The scene: Vince McMahon’s office at WWE headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. Jesse Ventura sits in an easy chair across from his desk.

  “Vince, you’ve always been a gambler. You’ve been P. T. Barnum on just about every stage in America. Except—I can bring you to the biggest stage out there. And that is the presidency of the United States.

  “We come at it from this angle, Vince. The wrestling fans feel that they’re being ignored. Just like the independent voters are. Well, this is America. America stands for freedom, a nation where anyone can run for the highest office in the land. So the WWE calls a press conference. You’re going to create your own political party. The hell with the Democrats and the Republicans. The people want a WWE candidate!

  “First you make this a legal political party. You run wrestling in just about every state. So you send your people out saying: do whatever it takes to get whoever we deem is going to be our candidate on the ballot. In all the states, people are collecting the signatures. As you do your various events, you have the crowd signing the petitions.

  “The Democrats and the Republicans don’t know what’s going on. Is this real? Is it not? It’s wrestling, after all. You, Vince, are of course the natural candidate. You’re the leader, the brains behind it all. That’s what we’ve got everybody thinking—up until the next WrestleMania approaches, in March of 2008.

  “Shortly before that is when I come on the scene to challenge you. Hey, Vince McMahon stands for corporate America! If this guy doesn’t mean special interest, who would? He’s got it tattooed to his forehead! I ridicule you; this time, I get to play the good guy
and you’re the villain! I turn you into the Democrats and the Republicans. Jesse Ventura comes out of retirement in the Baja to dethrone Vince.

  “I become the WWE’s candidate. At that point, it all becomes real. No longer a gimmick. We’re on the ballot in every state. And we haven’t had to raise any money to get there.

  “In the fall, if the two parties don’t let me into their debates, then you hold your own. And if the other candidates don’t show, you put up phony cardboard figures of them and make a mockery of the whole thing.

  “Because we’re also here to deliver the message to America: Look what we’ve turned into. I have every right to run. I was a mayor and know local government. I was a governor and know state government. It’s a natural progression. I am qualified to be the president. I’ve been there at every level but the federal, and how many governors become presidents? Lots. The point being that if they won’t let me in, we cry foul.

  “So that’s the mechanism I came up with, Vince, sitting down here in the Baja with too much time on my hands. It comes down to this: I can’t beat them conventionally. I can’t go into this and be competitive by doing it their way. They’ll destroy me too quickly. They’ve got to be tricked, fooled. Then you catch them in the final six months. I honestly believe, if the timing is correct, I can win. Because I also think that, by the time we build up to WrestleMania next spring, people are really going to be sick of all these other candidates.

  “That’s the great thing about wrestling, it’s there to create. You can take on anything, and nothing is beyond belief.”

  EPILOGUE

  Why I Didn’t Run in 2008 (And Still Might Someday)

  “A man does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.”

  —President John F. Kennedy

  The reason why I didn’t go for president as an independent in 2008 is quite simple: Vince McMahon never got back to me. He didn’t even give me the courtesy or respect of a return phone call, and I haven’t spoken to him since. I can’t compete against the Democrats and Republicans on their level, with their rules. I’d have had to do it my own way and, for lack of a better phrase, using some type of gimmick like I proposed to Vince. Then, once I achieved ballot access in all 50 states, I don’t think it would have required me to raise that much money—if I were allowed to debate.

  Anyway, it didn’t happen. Now the two parties are already talking about who’s running in 2012. Excuse me, didn’t we just get through two years of this? Give us a break! How about passing a law that says you’re not allowed to begin campaigning until the year of the election? I think the majority of people in the country would be all for that! Also, like I said earlier in the book, if you hold one office and decide to run for another, how about making a law that you have to resign the one you’re holding? You shouldn’t have a different rulebook for the public sector—for something you’d never be allowed to do in the private one.

  My decision about whether to run for the Senate in Minnesota against Norm Coleman and Al Franken was a much more difficult one to make. I seriously thought about it, and I was torn. Did I want to disrupt my whole life? Let me put it like this, so you truly understand how I feel: I’m a free spirit. For me, to decide to go to Washington would be the equivalent of someone knowingly violating their parole and then having to go back to jail to serve out their six-year sentence. That’s how much distaste I have for the leadership of this country and the Democrats and Republicans. I don’t even like those people, so why would I want to go hang with them for six years? However, my patriotism also entered into the picture—if not me, then who? I felt that Coleman and Franken were both very vulnerable, and I could have beat them.

  The day before the filing deadline in the middle of July, I appeared on Larry King. I talked about the double standard that any third-party candidate faces and also about the polls showing that I’d have a strong chance of winning. I also talked about the way the media had attacked my son, with absolutely no justification, when I was governor. And about how my daughter was afraid the same thing might happen to her. So I did not want to put my family in that position again.

  I did tell Larry there was only one way I might change my mind over the next twenty-four hours—and that was if God spoke to me. My brother called me after the show and said that was brilliant, because I’d left myself the only out that couldn’t be criticized. Nobody wants to question the existence of God, no matter how idiotic it might be, right? Well, later that night I looked at Larry’s Web site. It showed him with arms out and looking up to the heavens, saying something like, “God, if you’re listening, please call Jesse Ventura tonight to get him in the Senate race!” When I saw that, I rolled over and laughed. I loved Larry’s humor, and I think he was being sincere.

  So I was still in a quandary. Half of me said to run, the other half said it’s not worth doing this again to yourself and your family. It was four o’clock the next afternoon and filing ended by five, and it was a half-hour drive. That’s when my wife Terry looked at me and said, “Well, you’ve always believed in fate and destiny, haven’t you?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  And she said, “Then why don’t you flip a coin?”

  I looked at her for a moment and then said, “You’re right. We’ll let fate and destiny decide.”

  So I grabbed a quarter. We have a very hard-carpeted floor where a coin will flip and land without any question over the outcome—it’s gonna be either heads or tails. I walked out into the middle of that floor, turned to Terry, and said, “Okay. Heads I run, tails I don’t.”

  She said okay. I flipped the quarter up in the air and it came down tails.

  I looked at her and said, “I’m not running, let’s move on.” If it had come down heads, I would’ve gotten in the car, drove downtown, and filed.

  Then Terry was actually the weaker of the two of us. “You don’t want to make it two out of three?” she asked.

  I said, “No, that’s worthless, it’s not fate and destiny then.”

  My only further comment on the Senate race is what I hear on the street from people since the election, which ended in a deadlock between Franken and Coleman: “We wouldn’t be having this recount if you’d have run.” If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it twenty times. But I chew them out. I tell them, “Look, you had a candidate—Dean Barkley—and you chose not to vote for him. Dean stood for what I stand for. It’s your fault.” I just wonder when people are going to start really learning what’s going on locally, statewide, and federally, and step beyond the garbage they’re told by television.

  Two months before the election, I spoke at Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic in Minneapolis. Thousands of people turned out, which tells me there’s an awful lot of folks looking for an alternative to the two parties. I wore my Navy SEAL T-shirt and talked about a whole bunch of things that piss me off—things that I’ve delved into in this book: from the national debt, to the need for opening up the presidential debates, to the cover-up around 9/11, and the travesty of the Patriot Act. “If you want to be patriotic,” I told them, “then stand up for the Bill of Rights!”

  “Let’s get the revolution going,” I said. “If I see it start to rise up over the next two to three years, and if this country show me that it’s worth it for me to do it, well then maybe I’ll run for president in 2012.” The crowd went nuts.

  Right now I’m working on a few television pilots, returning somewhat to my old job of entertaining. On one of these I’m a judge—which, having named seventy-three judges when I was governor, I guess I could be. The other is on the Tru Network, which used to be Court TV, and it’s a show about conspiracies.

  How do I feel today about running for the highest office in the land? I’m not Nostradamus; I can’t predict the future. I don’t know where I’ll be or what will motivate me in 2012. A lot of it will depend on Obama. I mean, I’m not gonna run for president just to run—I do
n’t want the job that bad. If Obama does a great job and can turn this economy around, get us out of these wars, and bring back our respect among the international community again, there’s no reason for me to run. If Obama can’t do that, then there may be. And I’ll tell you this much: I’d give them a race they’d never forget!