Ventura: The Body and the Mind

Before his speech yesterday, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura sat down with Hoya Staff Writer Tim Sullivan to discuss his views on politics , current events and his future.

The Hoya: You’ve conducted a lot of your political career as against “the politics as usual,” and in large part that’s how you got elected governor. Senator [John] McCain ran in a similar pattern, running on reform issues like campaign finance reform and that type of thing. How important do you think the idea of reform is going to be in upcoming national politics, especially given the two not-reform-minded candidates we have for president right now?

Ventura: They’ll talk about it. If they make it a campaign issue, all you’re going to get is talk. As soon as the election is over, it will drift off into the sunset and you’ll never hear about it again for another four years. You have to remember something. Campaign finances today as we know them are the corroded arteries of these two parties. They’re not about to put a tourniquet on the very blood that feeds them. They’re not going to do it. They’ll talk about it, they may do little incidental changes that might look good on the surface but as long as there is a major loophole underneath to get around it, that’s what you’ll get. And I think it’s very important that we get our government and our elections away from corporate money and big money and get it back to ideas, rather than `he who raises.’ You’ll find most of these candidates, [Texas] Governor [George W.] Bush and Vice President [Al] Gore, I’m willing to bet you that they’re out campaigning seven days a week – I’m willing to bet five to six of those days are spent raising money.

The Hoya: As a follow-up to that question, how do you see your future in terms of pushing the reform agenda nationally, within innesota, within a third-party movement?

Ventura: People ask me all the time, `What am I doing to build the third party or my Independence party?’ Let me clarify that. We were the Independence Party of Minnesota in 1989. We then in 1996 affiliated with the then-national Reform Party. Last winter we disaffiliated and removed ourselves from the Reform Party. So we’ve been around now for 11 years. We’re doing fantastic in Minnesota. We’re the Mecca of the third-party movement, without a doubt. We’ve elected the highest third-party candidate in the nation, and we also have a slate of 40 to 50 statewide candidates in this year’s election. We actually faced primaries in seven or eight of them where we had more than one person who wanted to run and we’re growing. We’re solid in Minnesota and will continue to be so. I’m asked often `What am I doing to create the third party?’ or whatever. That’s not my job; my job is to govern the state of Minnesota, first and foremost. The job that falls to is Rick McCluhan, our state chair. It’s his job and the people around him to build the party. Certainly I’m there to support it, certainly I’m the highest elected official in it, but I have too much on plate in running the state of Minnesota, especially in the position I’m in, where I’m adversarial on both sides, and the press on both sides who love to see me falter. After all, none of them picked me to win so I embarrassed them. These are experts – you know the press is experts.

The Hoya: After your term as governor is up in two years what do you see as the future of Jesse Ventura in national politics?

Ventura: I don’t know. I may seek reelection again. I’ve learned one thing. I’m 49 now. One thing you learn as you get in your 40s is how bright your parents were. You don’t realize it when you’re in your 20s necessarily but when you get in your 40s you start to learn, `Gee, they were a lot smarter than I thought.’ And my father always told me how time speeds up as you get older. I believe him now because when I enlisted in the Navy, four years was an eternity. Now four years is going by so quickly I can’t believe it. And when you deal in a bureaucracy like government where things and decisions and changes go at a snail’s pace, much different than the private sector, you can’t accomplish everything in four years, I don’t think. So if I feel that there’s things I still want to accomplish, I’ll run for reelection. I’ll also base it upon, I’m in a good position to see who the Republicans and Democrats are going to put forward as the governor because they do it in June. I don’t have to file until July. I’m a Minnesotan, and I want to see who my next governor will be if I don’t run, so that will bear on it also. Where will I be? I don’t know, if I run again, I’ll do governor for another four years. I have really no intention of running for national office. But I’ve also learned in 49 years you never say never. I never thought I’d get in wrestling again, and lo and behold I did that last spring. I’ll put it this way, if I could predict tomorrow, I’d win the Powerball. That would be first on my agenda, wait for it to get to about 100 million and win it. Then I wouldn’t care about anything. So you don’t know where you’re going to end up, you really don’t. I mean if you’d have asked me four years ago if I was going to be the governor of Minnesota, I would have told you you were crazy, because I had no intention of running four years ago for governor. I had served as mayor of the sixth largest city [Brooklyn Park, Minn.] and I’d gone back to the private sector with the full expectation of not going back into elected office anymore. I’m a throwback. I believe our country was founded upon people getting elected and serving, and when they’re done serving, go back to what you used to do. I’m not one of these people that believes you take political science in college, you start getting elected at age 24, and you spend 35 years getting elected to different offices and you climb that ladder. Because all of a sudden when you’re doing that, you’re no longer serving the public, you’re serving yourself, because it’s now your career.