Land O' Ventura
On This Week with George Stephanoplous newscaster Cokie Roberts
made the statement that the people of Minnesota had voted for
Jesse Ventura for governor because he was a wrestler. Excuse me,
but this is the laziest journalism that I've ever encountered.
Has she ever talked with even a single person who said that
Ventura being a wrestler was the main reason, or even a reason
they voted for him? Has she seen a poll that said this? No. Of
course not. It's simply sloppy post hoc reasoning with no basis
in fact. It goes like this: Ventura was a wrestler. Minnesotans
voted for him. Therefore they voted for him because he was a
wrestler. You know, post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Ms. Roberts should have talked with me. I could have told her
why one person in Minnesota had voted for Ventura. And I wasn't
drunk, and I wasn't crazed from wrestling fandom, and I hadn't
been judged legally insane at the time. My intelligence was
supposedly 'normal' and I was educated enough to have a college
degree. And, no, I didn't think that it would be a swell
practical joke to play on everyone else in Minnesota. The
amazing truth was that I - like most of Ventura's voters -
decided to elect him because of his performance on a series of
televized debates on PBS. Incredible, but absolutely true. To a
lesser Ventura benefited from his ability to energize a portion
of the electorate - young voters - that usually bypass
elections, through the use of new media (ie) the internet.
Consider this: Ventura started out with about ten percent
support when he started the election and had the smallest
advertising budget of any of the candidates, most of which was
spent the week before. But, after each one of the debates (there
were about six, I believe) his poll numbers went up, although
the polls turned out to be amazingly inaccurate. Pre-election
polls showed Ventura with twenty five percent of the vote when,
in fact, he won with thirty-five percent. The young voters, who
unexpectedly came out in droves, were entirely discounted. If
Minnesotans had been be-glamored by his wrestling reputation, as
journalists believe, the polling numbers would have been exactly
opposite. By the way, even though Ventura had not wrestled for
more than a decade and had recently been a former mayor and
radio announcer, he was always referred to as a former wrestler.
How would you like it when people only mentioned your actions
from ten years back, and ignored what you've done recently?
Everyone seems to forget that there were two candidates that
Ventura ran against. The Democrat was Skip Humphrey, the son of
former US Vice President Hubert Humphrey and a former Minnesota
Attorney General of Minnesota. The Republican was the Mayor of
St. paul, former Democrat and carpet-bagger from Boston, Norm
Coleman. The reason everyone seems to forget about these guys is
that they were two of the greatest political mediocrities of our
time. Their great qualification for the governorship was that
they were next in line in their respective parties.
Both of them are nice guys. This is Minnesota, so you expect
that because nice is the law there. In fact, I've go a buddy
who's on a first name with Coleman and he tells me: "Normie's a
nice guy!" And from what I hear, Normie's making a pretty decent
senator, now. But back then, he didn't shine at all and somehow
for all the years he lived in the state he never was able to
shed that Boston accent which just grated on my ears. You'd have
thought he would have learned to at least say: " Yah, sure, you
betcha!" That way he could've blended in better.
Like most Ventura voters, I watched him in the PBS sponsored
debates. In the first debate I remember seeing him in between
the other two candidates, absolutely dwarfing them, looking a
tad bit like a circus strongman in a suit. I thought he looked
like a buffoon and really wondered what on Earth he was doing
there. Then the debate started and it was with an almost
mounting sense of horror that I realized that I agreed with
Ventura more than the other two, that he was actually making
sense, that what he was saying was thoughtful and intelligent.
Humphrey and Coleman? They had their lines well memorized and
that's all I can say for them.
I watched the other debates thinking this must be a fluke and
each time I came away with the same impression. Finally I
confessed to a close friend that I thought I was going to vote
for Jesse Ventura because I couldn't in good conscience vote for
either of the other guys. My friend looked around and told me
very quietly that he felt the same way and he was going to vote
for Ventura, also. See, there were a lot of guys like us in
Minnesota who were secret in our support of Ventura, but didn't
want it publicly known.
So, Jesse Ventura got elected and he was an okay Governor
despite what anyone tells you. His record was a little bit
mixed, but mostly I think he looks worse than he was because -
as he often charged - because the media was against him.
Politicians always say that, but in this case it happened to be
true. Why were they against him? Well, Media are people, too,
and they have their opinions and beliefs and most people in the
media voted for somebody else. The St. Paul Pioneer Press is an
excellent example of this. They had a comic strip, which I
believe they specially commissioned, called 'Venturaland' which
was in the Newspaper everyday. Sure, newspaper's have political
cartoons but never with such a clearly displayed bias. For some
reason, The St. Paul Pioneer Press didn't have a special cartoon
strip for the Republican Governor who preceeded Venura, nor did
they have a special cartoon strip for the Republican Governor
who succeeded him, either. Hmm, I wonder why.
The media can basically portray you any way they want to. Did
you ever think about what it would be like if every second of
your life had been recorded on camera? You could be shown to be
anything, because there are portions of your life that could be
taken out of context, exaggerated, etc. ... just like what was
done to Ventura. Yeah. He said some pretty outrageous stuff, but
so have you. It's just that his outrageous stuff was recorded
for all time and yours wasn't.