“No.”
“So you really don’t know if I drove that Porsche out of the driveway, do you?” He had to answer no. “How did you feel about sitting in a parking lot spying on someone, waiting to see if a car would leave a driveway?” I asked.
“I have to admit, I felt pretty peculiar.”
The registration for my cars, my driver’s license, everything identifying me, still had my Brooklyn Park address on it. The judge ruled that all the law required me to do to retain my position as mayor was maintain a domicile within Brooklyn Park. In other words, so long as I intended to remain domiciled in Brooklyn Park to the end of my term, I was OK. The judge proclaimed, “Since Mr. Ventura has announced that he is not seeking reelection, he has every right to look to his future, even to move his family out of the city.” He ruled completely in my favor. Do you know how much of the taxpayers’ money they spent trying to oust me? Thirty-three thousand dollars! People in love with power will go to any extreme to accomplish what they want.
My term as Brooklyn Park’s mayor was my political boot camp. It was my first look at bureaucracy from the inside. I found out the hard way that whenever you take a stand on an issue, no matter how insignificant, people will line up around the block to kick your ass over it. By having an opinion, you make yourself a target. Why do you think Congress likes to hide behind closed doors at decision-making times? I learned that there will always be people who disagree with you, no matter what you do. And the more power you have over people, the more likely you are to have some little faction that conspires to trip you up, take you down, or strip you of that power. But I also learned that when you have the courage to stand up and tell it like it is, good people will come out of the woodwork to get behind you.
I’d always been in the habit of speaking my mind, and during my term as mayor I was able to sharpen my ability to separate common sense from bullshit. My involvement in Brooklyn Park politics exposed me to a broad variety of social and political issues and gave me the chance to sort out where I stood on them. I researched, investigated, listened, learned, and took stands. I owed that much to the people I was serving—I had a responsibility to be conversant with the issues.
While I was serving as mayor, my habit of speaking my mind and making sense got me noticed by a guy named Steve Conrad, who was the director of KSTP Talk Radio. And that’s how I got started on another new career. One day, Conrad called me about an opening they had on the morning-drive slot. I had done a few radio shows for them, and they knew I was good on the mike and that my approach to political and social issues tended to stimulate a lot of debate. So I called Barry Bloom, we set it all up, and I hit the airwaves.
Talk radio and I were well matched. Cutting edge, controversial, “shock” talk is what gets ratings. I never really tried to be obnoxious or shocking, but I guess all you really have to do these days if you want to shock people is have an opinion. My opinions were strong; they were often different from what was popular. But they were based on the truth. They were hard to argue with.
When my term as mayor came to an end, I didn’t seek reelection because I would have had to give up my radio job. Equaltime laws wouldn’t allow me to broadcast during a campaign unless my opponents got the same opportunity. Giving up my radio job for a $10,000 part-time job didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Later, when I ran for governor, I had a similar problem.
After I had been on KSTP for about two years, they signed me to a new contract for another two years. I was just a few months into it when, seemingly out of the blue, they pulled me into the office and said, “We’re gonna take the morning show in a whole new direction. You don’t have to come in tomorrow.”
I said, “OK.” I went home and got Terry and said, “Load up the kids. We’re goin’ to the lake. We’re on a long vacation—with pay.”
She said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “They just fired me.” I was on a two-year contract. They were the ones who took me off the air, so they had to pay me.
They were true to the agreement—for about five weeks. Then, suddenly, the checks stopped coming. I called my attorney, David Olsen, and said, “Where’s my check?”
So David called KSTP, and Ginny Morris, my boss, said, “Well, we heard that Jesse Ventura refuses to work.”
David said, “What are you talking about? You’re the ones who took him off the air. He hasn’t refused to work. Get him his check!” So she met with me, gave me my check, and told me that she wanted to use me as a substitute for other hosts whenever they called in sick or took the day off.
I said, “Uh-uh. That’s not what I signed up to do. That’s not what my contract says. I don’t want to do that. That’s unacceptable.” We finally reached an agreement that I could live with. The financial part of the agreement is confidential, but I can tell you that I didn’t have to work as a fill-in host.
So why did they let me go? KSTP’s official line for public consumption was that I got fired because my ratings were low. But in this case the numbers don’t lie. I was in the number-two ratings position with male audiences; David Brauer, the guy they replaced me with, was only number nine. That couldn’t have been the reason. I never got an explanation. But I think one of the factors might have been that they got a little scared. They told me they wanted me out on the edge, they wanted me controversial, because that’s what gets listeners. And I enjoy being controversial. It’s fun; it makes for good radio. But being controversial can also get you an awful lot of negative attention, and you have to be willing to accept the negative along with the positive. I could handle it, but I guess they were afraid that any heat I took would also reflect onto them.
If I had to guess, I could trace their decision back to one specific incident. Our relationship was never the same after the day I used a particular word in reference to a state representative named Myron Orfield.
Myron is a true far-left Democrat. He’s got a very socialistic view of government: Everyone works for the common good, you throw your money into a community pot, and the government redistributes it. I had Myron on the show one morning, and jokingly I said, “Myron, you little commie, you!”
Oh my God! I called him a communist! He must have thought I’d just trashed his reputation, because all of a sudden he was threatening to sue. The top brass at KSTP freaked. They thought I’d done something atrocious. One of the higher-ups even likened it to calling him a child molester. I took offense at that. I went ballistic: “What! I called him a communist! Communism is a form of government! I can go vote for a communist, if I want to, in every election. They’re always on the ballot! They don’t get a whole lot of votes, but they’re there! I’ve never seen ‘Joe Shit, the ragman child molester,’ on the ballot before!”
The whole incident was incredibly stupid. Myron Orfield’s oversensitivity—and KSTP’s reaction to it—turned a molehill into a mountain. I felt betrayed because they left me dangling, feeling like I had done something wrong, when they were the ones who told me to be out on the edge, to be controversial and take risks!
But I did apologize to Myron the next day, on air. I realized I had mislabeled him. Do you know the difference between the definition of a communist and the definition of a socialist? Don’t feel bad; most people don’t. I looked it up in the dictionary. It turned out I was only half right. A communist is someone who believes that the government owns everything. There can be no private ownership. They redistribute the wealth evenly. A socialist believes there can be private ownership, but that government intervenes and redistributes the wealth. So I was only half right about Myron. He believes in the redistribution of wealth, but he also believes in private ownership. So when I apologized, I said, “You’re right, Myron. I shouldn’t have called you a communist. I should have called you a socialist.” I don’t think he took that any better!
From that point on, the relationship got progressively rockier between me and KSTP’s powers that be. I said, “Look, you’ve got all these fancy lawyers on retainer here
that you keep paying to do nothing but sit on their asses. At least I’m giving them something to do.”
Terry told me to talk to David Olsen and Alan Eidsness, my two lawyers. I let a couple of months go by before I took her advice. But when I finally called them and told them what happened, they laughed! I said, “You mean I’m not liable?”
They said, “Myron Orfield’s a public figure. You gave your opinion of him. They can’t sue you—it’d get thrown out of court in a New York second!” Because he chooses to be a public figure by running for office, he’s offering himself up for people’s opinion, just as people are now free to state their opinions of me. They can even call me a communist now, if they really want to. He had no grounds to sue. And I wasn’t even giving KSTP’s opinion, I was giving Jesse Ventura’s opinion! But from then on, the relationship got very strained over there. They got very standoffish with me, and I felt that they had left me flappin’ in the breeze.
So for about a year, I was more or less unemployed. I did a little bit of work in Hollywood, but that was about it. Mentally, it’s tough to be out of work. You start doubting yourself a little: What do you do? You’re forty years old, no one’s knocking on your door calling you to come out and be popular again.
Luckily, KFAN sports radio came along. They had looked into the situation, and they knew that KSTP wasn’t telling the truth about my ratings. KFAN is very testosterone-driven radio. It’s all sports. Their listener profile is about 92 percent men. They saw that my ratings among male listeners were great, and they thought I would make a good addition to their lineup.
On KFAN, my show took off. I’m the only sports-show host to have gotten a higher rating in the winter than in the fall. Fall is traditionally the strongest time for sports-talk radio, because it’s football season. My show did so well that they were saying I’d brought the station to a whole new level.
My radio show, although it was basically sports oriented, took on a sharp political edge. In between discussing games, I railed at government overspending, I ragged on bloated bureaucracy, and I roasted corrupt government officials. The KFAN people liked to send me out to do shows outside the studio, because I did really well with a live audience. Every Friday they’d send me out to a family restaurant, and I’d do “Paycheck Friday.” I’d say, “Let’s see who the government took the most from this week,” and I’d have people bring up their pay stubs.
At the time, I thought that with a solid mayoral term under my belt and a good, controversial radio show that was doing well in the ratings, I had gone as far into politics as I was going to go. If you had told me then that in less than two years I’d be living in the governor’s mansion (at least part-time), I’d have laughed.
The idea of running for governor really sneaked up on me. Not long after I had won the mayoral election, another election came around, this time for a seat in the U.S. Senate. I started seeing signs around town for a guy named Dean Barkley. Barkley wasn’t running as a Democrat or a Republican. He was running with what was at the time being called the Independence Party. I started looking into it, and I liked what they stood for. Like me, they were fed up with bipartisan mischief and wanted to put an end to it. They were big on term limits and campaign reform for the same reasons I was: Anything that kept the old boys’ network from getting a hold on power meant that more power remained in the hands of the voters. I decided to join. The Independence Party later changed its name to the Reform Party.
I went to bat for Dean Barkley and became a huge supporter of his campaign. The fact that he was running for something as big as the Senate brought the party to a whole new level. Unfortunately, Dean didn’t win, but he got over 5 percent of the vote in every county, which meant that he got the party qualified for the subsidy money that Minnesota makes available to major parties.
Dean ran for the Senate again later on. The second time around, I became the honorary chairperson of his campaign. But from the beginning of the campaign, Dean kept sidling up to me and whispering, “You know, Jesse. This campaign is great, but we have the wrong candidate. I think you should be running instead of me. You have the name. You can do it.”
I said, “Dean, I don’t wanna go to Washington; I wanna live in Minnesota; I don’t wanna live out there inside the Beltway—who wants to do that?” I’m just not an East Coast guy. I love the Midwest. It’s my chosen place to live.
But at one point, around 1996, after I had left the mayoral office, I was with Dean in a parade in Annandale, Minnesota. I was there to show my support for Dean and his campaign, but the people were cheering me! And it was his hometown! Again, Dean said, “See! They want you! You should be running!” I said, “Uh-uh, Dean. I told you, I don’t wanna go to Washington.” Then as a joke, I said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll run for governor.” That was what started it.
It snowballed from there. All that summer of 1996, people kept urging me to do it. That’s when I first started thinking about it seriously. There was this ripple of excitement going around town. The local Reform Party was solidly behind me. Since the parade, I had started testing the water a little bit, just to see what kind of public support there might be for my run. Most important of all, I talked about it on the radio and had gotten a sense from my listeners that they were overwhelmingly behind me. They’d call up and urge, “Run, Jesse, run! We’ll back you. We’re tired of these guys. Do it!” They put a lot of pressure on me to go for it.
Some time around August 1997, Dean Barkley and Doug Friedline, who later became my campaign manager, called a meeting with me and Terry in our barn on the ranch. They asked me, point-blank, to run. They were very solemn, very serious. I told them, “Look. Let me think about this for a few months. If I decide to do it, we’ll announce it in January.”
Terry was not exactly thrilled about this idea. She didn’t want to see this happen. She tried to talk me out of it. But I kept telling her, “Look, honey, if I don’t do this, who will? If we don’t get someone in there soon, it’s going to be the death of the Reform Party in Minnesota.” I kept talking to her about it, until finally she gave in. I’m not sure how convinced she was, but she’s always said I’m not an easy guy to say no to. I guess she’s right. Look what she said twenty-four years ago when I asked her to marry me!
In January 1998, I went onto the steps of the capitol, called a press conference, and announced that I was running for governor. I went up there by myself; I didn’t think it was appropriate to bring my family with me. I stood alone and announced my intentions.
Traditionally, candidates always come out surrounded by their families, to show how strong they are in family values, whatever those are. It’s all bullshit. It’s nothing but a photo op. I didn’t want to use my family that way—just to prop up my image. The press said, “Where’s your family?”
I said, “This has nothing to do with my family. This is business. This is the business of running the state.” And a lot of people respected that, because it was the truth.
At first, nobody took my announcement seriously. Everybody thought it was a great joke: the big ex–pro wrestler running for governor—what’s he gonna do, body-slam legislators when they get out of line? That first day I announced my candidacy, the press barely took notice. They reported it, but they probably thought it was just a publicity stunt. I think KFAN might have seen it that way, too. But I never did. When I made the decision to run for governor, I took it extremely seriously from the very beginning.
KFAN wasn’t overly pleased when I decided to run for governor, because the show was doing phenomenally well. But I had stated that I was going to run, so I felt that I had to stick to it. It wasn’t just my controversialism that made me popular, it was also the fact that I backed it up with credibility. People knew I had a reputation for standing by what I said. And I believed that if I lost my credibility, I would lose the very thing that was making me popular. I told all this to Steve Woodbury, the station manager, and he agreed with me. But they still weren’t crazy about losing me.
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br /> After the official announcement, Dean, Doug, and I outlined the strategy for the campaign. We knew that in a three-way race, we’d have to be polling in the mid-twenties by election time. If we could get that far, we knew we had a shot. We looked to see where Ross Perot had made it big in Minnesota during his presidential campaign, because we knew that area would be the heart of our movement. We found out that Anoka County supported Perot strongly, so we decided to focus our efforts there (and when the election results came in, sure enough, I got more votes in Anoka County than my opponents combined).
We targeted the areas that were strong on third parties—all in the highly populated middle belt of the state. In the rest of the state, we got what we could. We went up and visited the Iron Range a few times; that was Skip Humphrey’s stronghold. We made some forays into the south, where Norm Coleman was big. But for the most part, we focused on the center of the state. And if you look at the election results, you can see that our campaign came together just the way we planned it: Humphrey won most of the north, Coleman got most of the south, and I got the Twin Cities and the suburbs, where the vast majority of Minnesota’s population lives.
Then, too, we realized that high voter turnout would be on our side. Although Minnesota usually has one of the higher voter turnouts in the nation, still only about 50 percent of the population comes out to vote in nonpresidential elections. Well, to us that meant that one out of every two people on the street was a potential “customer” of ours. One out of every two doesn’t vote! Why? Because they’ve been alienated by the two traditional parties, because they believe their votes don’t count. We knew we had to do something to instill them with confidence in their votes again, we knew we had to tell them, “Come back and vote, and watch it count this time.”
Democrats and Republicans don’t like high voter turnouts. They like to have their dependable little core groups—a tiny percentage on the far left, a tiny percentage on the far right—who come out predictably every few years and get them reelected. It’s which way the broad middle leans that determines who wins. Well, now they had a broad middle candidate, with access to the majority of Minnesotans.
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