These days, when you’re in the public eye, the press does anything they can to try to bring you down. They take things out of context, they make mountains out of molehills. Now they’re making a big deal out of the fact that I have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. So what? Why is that news? How does that affect any Minnesotan? That’s been the lead story in the paper two or three times—the front page! Well if the governor can’t have one, who can? If you don’t trust your governor with a firearm, who do you trust? I’m the head of the state troopers. In fact, one of my state troopers said to me, “Why do you even need to have a permit to conceal and carry? You’re our boss. It should go without saying!” And I’m highly qualified—I’ve had more training with firearms than all but a select few in the nation.
Because they insist on focusing on nonsense like this, the media’s losing credibility with the public. The public doesn’t believe them anymore. It’s obvious that the press is working an agenda. Rather than dealing with things that affect the State of Minnesota, they would rather focus on personal things that affect me. And it’s kind of funny, in a sad sort of way, that since nowadays the press tries so hard to get into your private life and expose you, that this is the best they could do with me. That’s my big, dirty secret.
I don’t get this. I just released a budget! This is what the state’s going to be running on for the next two years—surely there’s something in that budget that’s worth discussing. Don’t they think that’s what they ought to be looking at instead of whether or not I can carry a firearm?
Recently, people have started telling me they want me back on the radio because they trust what I’m telling them. People keep coming up to me and saying, “Jesse, God, get back on the air! We wanna hear from you directly!” In response, we’re getting ready to put together a radio show called “Lunch with the Governor,” which will probably air on Fridays from about one to three in the afternoon.
They want to hear me telling them what’s going on inside their government. I’m proud of Minnesotans for wanting to be that involved. They’re an inspiration and an example to the rest of the nation.
I think the fact that Minnesotans are calling for this ought to send a message to the media. It’s bigger than just them wanting to hear me. I think the people are beginning to feel betrayed by the press. They’re seeing that the press misleads them, that it’s not just presenting the facts anymore. They know it’s going for shock, and they don’t trust it to be accurate anymore.
Worst of all, they’re not just going after me, they’re trying to take Terry down, too. That’s what really pisses me off. They should leave her alone. At one point Terry was telling the press that she was basically a low-profile kind of person. She said, “I don’t want to be a big leader and have lots of power like Hillary Clinton.”
The next day, somebody responded in a scathing editorial, “Rest assured, Mrs. Ventura, you’re no Hillary Clinton.”
Terry took offense at that. But I said, “Take that as a compliment—as the best compliment you could receive.”
According to recent polls, I have the highest job-approval rating of any governor in Minnesota’s history right now and the lowest disapproval rating, and I’ve only been in office a few months! And yet all the media can do is look for things to complain about. Sometimes I get the impression that the press sees someone doing really well, and they say to themselves, “OK, it’s time to take this guy down.”
It’s bugged me that there’s been so much discussion about whether or not I’m “up to the job.” They kept asking whether I could do it. I told them, “I’ve jumped out of thirty-four airplanes. I’ve dived two hundred feet under the water. I’ve rappelled out of the hellholes of helicopters. I’ve done things that would make Skip Humphrey and Norm Coleman wet their pants. And you’re questioning whether I have the integrity and the ability to do what they do? I’d say, do they have the ability to do what I’ve done? I don’t think they do, either one of them.” The media never questioned whether Humphrey could govern. They never questioned whether Coleman could govern, in spite of the fact that Coleman was only in public service for about the same amount of time as I was mayor of Brooklyn Park.
Every governor brings his or her own unique set of qualifications to the job. I’m basically an entertainer. Communication is my strong point. I’m not necessarily going to do this job the way a lawyer or an administrator would. One of the strengths I bring from my entertainment background is the ability to look at issues from a different perspective and to communicate a different point of view. That’s where I can do the greatest good: observing and then relaying to the people what I see going on in their government.
My military training has really helped me gain the discipline this job requires. People worry about whether I’m going to get eaten alive by the political machine. If that was going to happen, I’d have been eaten already. I expect things to get rocky from time to time, but, as “Mother” Moy advised me, when things seem tough, I remind myself that being a SEAL was the best training in the world for the job. It keeps things in perspective: I’ve faced death; I’ve dealt with things that can kill me. Nothing I do will ever be as tough as what I did back then.
The structure I learned from the navy works well in this context. Although in everything else I’ve done up to this point I’ve been an independent person working only for myself and my family, I’m now part of something much larger. In the navy scheme of things, I’ve now become a commanding officer, and my job is to delegate and follow through.
The role of governor of Minnesota is bigger than I am. I understand that. That’s why I’m willing to sometimes put on a suit and tie when I go to work instead of the jeans and T-shirt I’m most comfortable in. I get dressed up out of respect for the dignity of the office. I have to maintain a certain demeanor that’s expected of the office. I have to swallow insults as the governor that I never would have swallowed just as Jesse. It’s not what I do but what the governor does, and I’m fulfilling that role now.
I have perspective about it now, but I can’t say that the transformation took place overnight. It’s been very hard for me to get used to walking away from a fight. It goes against my nature. In fact, the day after the election, I made a comment that really got people stirred up. I’d had way too little sleep and way too much Dom Perignon the night before. In between all the official hand shaking I had to do that day, I managed to crawl into KFAN, clutching my head, and I did my show for an hour. During that hour, I indulged in one brief, small gloat-fest.
One day during the campaign, I had gone on the radio with Jason Lewis, a guy I used to work with at KSTP. He calls himself a Libertarian, but he’s really a right-wing Republican; he carries the Republican agenda. Lewis calls himself “Minnesota’s Mr. Right.” Lewis and I have never really gotten along. When we were on the air that day, he had told me to my face that I couldn’t win. He was so sure I’d lose that he wanted to bet money on it.
Well, when I went on the air the day after my victory, I couldn’t resist a little poke at Jason Lewis. I said, “I wanna say something to another person at another radio station and I’m gonna call him Mr. Wrong. Mr. Wrong, who works in public television, taking from the public trough, Mr. Wrong, who said I couldn’t get this done. Well, Mr. Wrong, you can stick it where the sun don’t shine!”
After I said that, somebody (and to this day I don’t know who) actually mailed Lewis a dead crow in a box, with a note that said, “Eat your crow, baby.” The day it arrived in the mail, Lewis was out of town. In fact, he didn’t come home until two or three days later, by which time that crow must have made a pretty pungent entree.
I was determined to start this term off on a fresh note. During the transition period I went out to all the heads of all the different government departments to meet them and find out what they do. A lot of them were totally astonished that a governor would come out and meet them. Some of these department heads had been there for twenty-some years and had never met a governo
r.
I worked hard for those three months, learning the ropes, introducing myself. The outpouring of enthusiasm I got from the people I met confirmed my belief that the next four years are going to make history. From Election Day on, the excitement kept building and building, to the point where I was really looking forward to the day after the inauguration, when I figured things would start to quiet down a little.
The inauguration was about the most formal thing I’ve ever gone through in my life, but it was beautiful. We stuck pretty much to tradition, out of respect for the office. Terry coordinated the whole thing, right down to the flowers and the outfits—one of those thankless, payless jobs that are expected of the first lady. She picked out flowers in Minnesota colors: blue delphiniums and yellow and white roses. We had a full orchestra and three choirs. Lunds supermarket donated thousands of blue and yellow sugar cookies in the shape of the state. There was even a team from Starbucks working the crowd—one lady with a stack of cups, another with a tank of coffee on her back and a nozzle in her hand.
On the morning of the inauguration, the temperature was thirteen below zero. There was a pretty fierce wind blowing, too, which brought the windchill down to about minus forty-five. In spite of the weather, we still drew a record crowd. I disappointed a lot of people, though, when I announced I wasn’t going to rappel down the capitol dome as I’d promised—but if I’d done it that day, Minnesota would have ended up with an ice cube for a governor.
I decided that when it came time for my speech, I was just going to get up there and be myself. I’d made it all the way through the campaign without a single note. I figured that now was the time, if there ever was one, to speak from the heart.
But there was one note that I read during my speech—the one that arrived at my house the night before the inauguration. That note said, “I’m sure you must be nervous and apprehensive, maybe even a little frightened about that challenge ahead of you. But keep this in mind: you’ve been pushed, tried, and tested by the best. And you passed with flying colors. Keep that in mind . . . and don’t change a thing. Sincerely, Master Chief Terry ‘Mother’ Moy.”
We decided that a fancy black-tie inaugural ball for a select few just wasn’t my style. We figured the inaugural festivities should be available to all Minnesotans. We held a huge blowout at Target Center, a 20,000-seat arena, about a week after the inauguration, and we made sure the tickets were priced within reach of the average working person—fifteen bucks each. And as huge as Target Center is, they still sold out. The place was packed. It was a blast.
Well, it turned out I was wrong about the excitement dying down after the inauguration. Barry Bloom told me that I was the most written-about person in the world for the month of January, except maybe for Clinton—and I bet he wasn’t too pleased with a lot of his coverage. Even after all the festivities were over, it’s just kept on building. What’s happening here in Minnesota right now is incredibly exciting. People are smiling. Change is in the wind.
The most brilliant people are coming out of the woodwork to join my staff. There’s a guy named Gerald Carlson, a fifty-five-year-old highly successful retiree from a company called Ecolab. He’s set for life; he doesn’t need to work. But he came out of retirement to be my commissioner of trade and economic development. Two weeks after he came on board, he came up and thanked me: “You’ve revitalized me. You’ve rejuvenated my life. I’m focused again, I’m not ready to retire, I’m ready to roar! My attitude is, there isn’t one job we’re gonna let out of Minnesota!”
I had no idea the kind of talent we’d be getting on board with us. One day I was getting to know the staff, so we were going around the room and each person was supposed to tell something about themselves that most people might not know about them. I told everyone I’d been the first swimmer in Minneapolis to break one minute in the hundred-yard butterfly. Then Michael O’Keefe, my director of human services, got up and said, “I have a degree in nuclear physics!” I almost tipped over in my chair. That’s the kind of brilliant people who have come on board with me.
Something’s happening here. Minnesotans are on the move; they’re enthusiastic about their government again. This could be the start of the revolution we’ve been waiting for—if we choose to make it so.
But I can tell you right now, from what I’ve seen so far, we’ve got a big job ahead of us. When you’re on the inside, looking at government on a statewide scale, you get a sense of just how huge the bureaucracy is. People think you can come into an office like this with a magic wand and right all the wrongs.
People come up to me continually with their personal problems—terrible, tragic problems—and I have great sympathy for them. But they don’t understand that government is a huge, huge piece of machinery. And if you look at government as an engine, maybe the governor is the carburetor. The pistons are the two legislative bodies. It takes all the parts to make it work. Nationally, Minnesota is third in government size, though we’re somewhere around twentieth in population. This is one engine that needs a major overhaul, because somehow it’s grown far too many extra parts.
I think many people come in like I did, with a clean slate and good intentions, then get gobbled up by the machine. I view the traditional two parties as in some ways very evil. They’ve become monsters that are out of control. They were created with good in mind, but they’ve grown into unhealthy things. The two parties don’t have in mind what’s best for Minnesota. The only things that are important to them are their own agendas and their pork. Government’s become just a battle of strength, nothing more—a battle of power between the two parties, each trying to get the upper hand.
But now that Minnesota has a governor and a first lady who truly come from the private sector, a lot of light’s going to be shed on how the system is unfair to people outside the two parties. A case in point: Between November 4 and January 4, I had to work twelve- and fourteen-hour days just to get acclimated and prepared for the job as governor. Do you know how much I got paid for the work I did during that time? Nothing! And this was on top of six months of no pay, since I had to leave my job at KFAN because of the equal-time laws.
That’s one of the ways the system works against you if you come from the private sector. Now if Humphrey or Coleman had won, guaranteed, they’d have continued to bring in a paycheck, as attorney general and mayor respectively, during the whole transition period, just like they did during the campaign. But I guarantee you, they wouldn’t have had time to do those jobs—not while working those long days with the transition teams. We need to change this. We need to see to it that incumbent public servants aren’t getting paid for their jobs when they’re not doing them.
I also see a real bias against the first lady in the way things are traditionally set up. During a governor’s term, the first lady is required to run the residence. She’s the head of the household staff, and she’s responsible for all the official entertaining and functions that go on at the residence. She’s expected to maintain an appropriate wardrobe—she can’t entertain heads of state in Zubaz and a T-shirt. How much does she get paid to do all that? Not one penny.
Terry’s a businesswoman. She has her own horse business at our ranch in Maple Grove. Since she’s had these responsibilities at the governor’s residence, she’s had to hire people to run the ranch in her absence. That money’s all out of pocket; she gets no compensation for that.
Now, if Mae Schunk becomes governor after me, do you think her husband, Bill, is going to quit his job as an executive to run the residence for free? Of course not. Or, if I were single, someone would have to have been hired and paid to do the job. But because Terry’s my wife, she’s expected to do this for free. That’s sexism.
So during my term as governor, I’m going to work toward getting pay for the governor-elect during the transition period from November 4 to January 4. And I’m going to try to get it set up so that the first lady gets compensated for running the residence. It doesn’t have to come out of taxpayers�
� money—the residence is maintained on private donations; she could be paid out of that. If I can get these things set up, they’re not necessarily going to benefit me and Terry, but they will make things a little fairer for the next governor and first lady (or man!).
Nobody knows what to expect from the next four years. Roger Moe, Humphrey’s running mate, even called my term a fouryear blind date. A lot of the media has speculated that since I’m a third-party candidate, the legislature is going to degenerate into a three-ring circus. They’re afraid we’re going to get into a three-way deadlock on everything. I don’t foresee that happening. We might get into a few two-way deadlocks, because it will really come down to which way the moderates swing—but that’s pretty much the way it goes in bipartisan politics anyway. It’ll be a two-way battle, but this time, whichever side has me will be the heavyweight!
It will all depend on who comes with the most centrist position—who’s willing to move? My position has always been that since the two parties have gotten so extreme, there’s nobody representing the middle. So that’s where I’ve put myself to the greatest extent possible: in the middle, where I believe the majority of Minnesotans are. And see, it just doesn’t make for a great insult. You can’t hurt someone by calling them a centrist. It doesn’t quite have that sting!
A case in point is the issue over the return of the budget surplus. I decided that since the middle class gets shafted so often in budgetary and tax matters, I was going to favor them with the budget-surplus return. It wouldn’t even things out entirely, but maybe it would help a little. Well, here’s the position I’ve put myself in: the far right-wingers are calling me a bleed-the-rich liberal, and the far left-wingers are yelling at me for sticking it to the poor! Their thinking is so entrenched in the extremes, they’re so accustomed to thinking in terms of two parties, that they have to see me as one or the other. They can’t fathom that I can take the best of each and be in the middle. They don’t believe it can be done.
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