Jesse ("The Body") Ventura:

Comments on this column:

I voted for Jesse and am proud to say so, and I do read and am 51 yrs old and have been voting since I turned 21. I think it is time the two party system gets a shaking and Jesse may be the best man for the job. God knows he cannot be any worse than what we have had for the past several years.
(Barb)

Thanks for some great thoughts in your Viewpoint column in today's PP. I think it reveals what this election was all about. I tried searching the paper's website but couldn't find the test of it. Can you tell me where it can be found ¾ or even email it to me. There are several friends out of state with whom I'd like to share it.
(Mario Tosto)

My mother in law is living with my family this month, and she isn't very ambulatory, and she is on oxygen much of the time. So we gave her our TV room down on the first floor, so she wouldn't have to climb stairs. Since the TV was there, she got the TV as well.

What this meant was that a sacred ritual of mine, channel surfing to watch the election returns on election night, fell by the wayside this year. Instead of sitting up past her bedtime alongside Anna, who doesn't understand all that much, and zapping from ABC to NBC to CBS (we don't have cable), I slipped quietly upstairs and followed the elections on the Internet.

Friends, it's a whole nuther experience. And not a bad one. No more waiting five minute for Dan Rather to update the single race in New York which you don't care about, or instead of watching the local outlets pad from campaign headquarters to campaign headquarters, hearing how the local party hacks feel about the votes trickling in.

On the Internet you're in charge. You can visit any of the major news sites -- MSNBC, ABCnews, Yahoo, Reuters, CBSnews -- and watch the votes in the elections you care about, and only in those elections. You, the news junkie, are in charge.

Last night was not only a great night for vote watching, it was a great night for voting, period. Because just as I have grown tired of the stale, top-down quality of network news, I have also grown tired of the stale, top-down quality of major party politics.

Here in Minnesota's gubernatorial race, we were faced with a choice between a Democrat of impeccable bloodlines, Hubert Humphrey III, and a renegade Democrat who turned Republican for the sake of running for governor, Norm Coleman.

In a normal election they would have been considered good enough choices. Humphrey is duller than yesterday's toast, a traditional liberal generating programs the way you and I generate methane. Coleman, despite his Kennedyesque mannerisms, and despite a big-city demeanor uncommon in Minnesota politics (he's from Brooklyn), ran a pretty respectable campaign against a household name, and many picked him to win.

It was a safe, who-cares election.

But the voters came riding to the rescue, focusing on a candidate wearing the colors of Ross Perot's Reform party.

And what a candidate he was. A gigantic, growling former professional wrestler and bad actor -- he got offed, a fate that often befalls bad actors in action movies, in the opening scenes of Arnold Schwarzneggar's Predator -- named Jesse ("The Body") Ventura.

When I heard Ventura was running, I rolled my eyes. Yes, he had been part-time mayor of a Twin Cities suburb, much as Clint Eastwood had been mayor of Carmel, Calif., on a whim. And he had his own talk show for a couple of years. His husky rasp was a familiar sound on the airwaves. His politics were populist libertarian. His competence to be governor -- probably minimal.

When Hillary Clinton came to Minnesota supporting Humphrey, she called Ventura a "sideshow." Jesse remarked that, if he were Hillary, he wouldn't have left her husband alone in D.C.

But the voters saw through all the dumb stuff to the central truth: that politics itself is the overriding issue of 1998. Governors come and governors go. Ventura may be a one-termer, and if he is bad, he will likely be hilariously bad. Or he could become a fine, different model for a modern governor.

It doesn't matter. Voters looked beyond the political cliches and saw that, good governor or bad, governors don't mean a hill of beans in a state's overall fortunes. But that a putrid political system, in which money buys elections, big media call the shots, mudslinging wins, and two fat, dull, blue-suited parties divide all the spoils between them, discourages the citizenry until the vote means next to nothing.

The Internet played a role in this. People who have grown accustomed to having their own way in an interactive system turned from their computer screens to the political arena, and sais, wow, is that bad.

My mother in law had a good question this morning: "Is Jesse Ventura qualified to be governor?"

Not according to those in the know. But he got the votes, and in a democracy, who the people say is qualified matters more than what people in the know think.

How big is this regional blip on the electoral screen? I say, electing Jesse Ventura saved politics itself. Not forever, but for the next couple of years. And that's the most democracy ever promises.

Next step: an all-wrestler legislature.

Way to go, Minnesota.