July
9
A New Hurdle for Al Franken: Jesse Ventura?
Updated
Is a celebrity candidate about to trump another celebrity candidate's political aspirations?
That may be in the works in Minnesota, when satirist Al Franken's campaign to unseat incumbent Norm Coleman for a U.S. Senate seat could be shaken by the entrance of former Gov. Jesse Ventura in the race.
Ventura has until Tuesday to decide whether to enter the contest running as a member of the Independence Party, and he's encouraged by recent polls showing him drawing one-quarter of the votes in a three-person race.
He tells Variety, "When I ran for governor [in 1998], the weekend before the election, I was only polling 27. so I am only three points off what I was when I won. And we haven't even had a debate yet."
If he gets in, Ventura would capitalize on voter anger and protest, perhaps peeling away support from Franken, who is trailing Coleman in polls by anywhere from three to 10 percentage points.
"If Jesse Ventura jumps in the race, I think Al Franken's already challenged candidacy is on ice," says University of Minnesota political science professor Lawrence Jacobs. "Maybe the ice thaws, but Franken's prospects depend on voters who are angry or disaffected by the incumbent and are choosing to vote for him. If Ventura jumps in the race, he is going to drain away some of the anti-incumbent vote that Franken would get."
A spokesman for Franken did not return calls for comment.
As an alternative to a gubernatorial bid, Ventura says he is mulling some "irons in the fire" in Los Angeles. But he's been an emerging presence in the media, as he has just come off tour of his most recent book, "Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!," and certainly the attention doesn't hurt.
"It is a complete change of life for me, but I am not sure I want to make that change, make that commitment," Ventura says. "But if I do, rest assured, I will go out there with revolution on my mind, like my book says. I will be the biggest pain in the ass they have ever had on the Senate floor. That is my goal, because I don't like the system, and I don't like the fact that they have put us $9 trillion in debt."
In an interview on Tuesday for an upcoming print column, he sounded like a candidate, ready to needle his opponents at every turn. He mapped out a renegade campaign strategy in which he would raise money on the Internet yet not spend more than $1 million for his bid. "I will not spend more than I earn," he says, "and that gives me I think a million dollar cap, because the salary for a senator is 170,000."
Instead, he would depend in part on a bang up performance in a debate with Coleman and Franken, confronting them on what he characterizes as a corrupt two-party system and their drawbacks as politicians.
Franken "moves back to Minnesota, when he hasn't lived here for 30 years. You know, come on. I was a pro wrestler who went all over the world, all over the country, and I always maintained a drivers license and paid my taxes in the state of Minnesota. Can he say that? Absolutely not. He only came back here two years ago to start running for the Senate. That is what irks me on his side.
"On Coleman, it is the fact that he is a rubber stamp for the war I opposed, and I feel that anyone who voted for that war does not deserve to hold office. That is how strong I feel, because they were duped, and if you can be duped like that, they do not deserve to be in that position."
Among Ventura's proposals are to restrict candidates to raising money only from the states in which they are running, and to offer voters a choice of "none of the above" on election ballots. He also has suggested term limits on reporters --- after a contentious relationship with the local media that covered him during his tenure.
Ventura also takes exception to the way that third-party candidates are characterized in the media and by other politicians, particularly unconventional candidates like himself. He still stings from the way that he was labelled in his 1998 bid --- as a 'former pro wrestler' rather than the former mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minn., while his challengers were given their elected titles.
He was "offended" when Coleman recently referred to him as "Jesse" rather than "governor."
"I think people within the business should refer to me with the proper respect. The point is I was the governor, and I would expect them to give me the proper title."
He's well aware of how a three-person dynamic can change the race. In the 1998 gubernatorial election, Ventura garnered 37% of the vote and defeated Coleman and state Attorney General Skip Humphrey, in one of the biggest upsets in state political history. His candidacy was driven at voter anger, particularly young state residents who were able to register at the polls to vote. But Ventura chose not to seek reelection in 2002, and Republicans have suggested that should he run they will be able to make an issue out of his record.
"I don't run from it one bit," Ventura says. "They don't attack me for my record. They attack me personally."
Franken has taken heat for the emergence of a racy humor piece he wrote for Playboy and for other flaps, but Ventura says that Franken's humor career has "no bearing on him running for office."
He even once was with Franken on a flight to Dallas once and said he "showed me great respect."
But Ventura says he took the opportunity to challenge the way that Franken wrote about him in one of his books. Ventura says that in the book, Franken chided him for chewing gum at late Sen. Paul Wellstone's funeral and then walking out in protest when it turned into a raucous rally.
"He apologized for it," Ventura says, "which told me he didn't really write the book. His kids did, because he said he didn't remember what he had written about me. I don't know if that was truthful or not. But it seemed like it was. So I kind of think he didn't write the book, so he had his Harvard underlings do it so they had to dig something up on me."
What's holding him back? He cites the public's lack of outcry when Ross Perot was shut out of the 1996 presidential debates, even though he got one-fifth of the vote in 1992. "If the people are lemmings and don't give a damn, why should I? You know, I got another life to lead. I don't have to do this. you know, that is the dilemma I face. Do I want to leave the life I am leading now to change it and go do this?"
Update: Ventura, who would run as a member of the Independence Party, says that he has never had a conversation with follow independent Mike Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, who plans to help raise money for the party in Minnesota later this month.
"Kinda weird, ha?" Ventura says of the lack of contact with Bloomberg, "Considering [columnist] Eleanor Clift dubbed me the 'high priest of the third party movement.' So you would think that any one who tried [to run for president] would want to talk to me, but maybe I am too radical for them."
Photo: Official statehouse portrait of Jesse Ventura.
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