I watched most of the Minnesota governors debate on Cspan. I will confess to laying on the couch. With The clicker in one hand and a Heine in the other. If they ever start making Heine "tall boys" I'll be in heaven. Although, I do like Old Dutch and you can use it for paint thinner and grease remover too. Anyway, when I'm in that kind of a mode or mood, I can usally take about 30 minutes of pro-wrestling. Then I'm off to watching space aliens or reruns of serious stuff like crop circle investigation. I always tell my seven year old daughter don't believe anything you see on TV and I mean anything. It's all make believe; I'm even skeptical about the weather channel with her.
Here in Ohio our democratic candidate Lee"the attorney"Fisher lost to Sir Bob Taft the VI(sixth). Lee "The attorney" just couldn't get a grip on Sir Bob VI. I tried my best to get Lee "the attorneys" handlers to try out a move that I called the tax abatement neck breaker. It would have rquired "the attorney" to get up on the top rope facing out toward the crowd and do a back flip catching Sir Bob by the neck with his legs and slamming him to the mat. Well this move was attempted. But "the attorney" missed Sir Bob"s neck and ended up on his ass. Now there may have been some interference from some of "the attorneys" fans from Shaker Heights in his execution of this move. I don't doubt that. I mean, hey if your from Shaker Heights and you got a sweet tax abatement deal, why ruin a good thing. Flashing those pictures of dead presidents is enough to ruin anybodies concentration.
The other move I wanted Lee"the attorney" to do is called the corporation ball buster. The fans in Shaker Heights heard about this early on just after the weigh-in, and, boy were they scared.
Sincerely,
Tom Lehman
Doug Henwood wrote:
> [A memo on the Jesse "The Body" Ventura victory in Minnesota by Micah
> Sifry, formerly of The Nation and now of Public Campaign, a group promoting
> campaign finance reform. "Clean money" ballot initiatives based on their
> model passed in Massachusetts and Arizona Tuesday. This is the unedited
> draft of a piece that should appear in Salon imminently.]
>
> If this was a "Seinfeld election," an election about nothing, then how
> do you explain Jesse Ventura's stunning victory in the Minnesota
> governor's race last Tuesday? Even the 47-year-old former Navy Seal
> and professional wrestler turned talk-radio host and small-town mayor
> seemed at an uncharacteristic loss of words. "Ask them," meaning the
> voters, he told reporters the day after the election.
>
> Actually, looking at the voters is a good place to start. Ventura won
> the three-way race against Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Hubert
> "Skip" Humphrey III by a vote of 37 to 34 to 29 percent, respectively.
> But the day before the election, the Star-Tribune/KMSP-TV Minnesota
> Poll showed him tied with Humphrey at 29 percent each, with Coleman
> leading at 36 percent. What happened?
>
> A huge surge of new voters, many of them newly enthusiastic young
> people, showed up at the polls. And Minnesota allows voters to
> register to vote as late as election day. At one precinct in St. Paul,
> 120 of the more than 600 people that voted were new registrants.
> Turnout exploded. According to state election officials, it was like a
> presidential election was taking place. Typically, about fifty-three
> percent of eligible voters come out for a mid-term election in
> Minnesota, but estimates of Tuesday's turnout were running at sixty
> percent and higher. Twenty-eight percent of the people who voted for
> Ventura said they wouldn't have if he were not on the ballot,
> according to exit polls. And it was the mobilization of these
> "unlikely voters," as I predicted a week ago in Salon, that made all
> the difference.
>
> The shape of Ventura's vote was as important as its size. He did well
> with all the age groups except those over 60, and won a whopping 46
> percent of the 18 to 29 year olds. (Does this mean that Generation X
> agrees with the Ventura radio ad where he declared that "The Rolling
> Stones and Led Zepellin are the greatest rock bands of all time?"
> Don't tell MTV.) He won strong pluralities from all the income groups
> except those making over $100,000. Women were almost equally likely to
> vote for him as men, despite the noise over his comments suggesting he
> favored the legalization of prostitution. About the only group he did
> poorly with were people with post-graduate degrees, who along with the
> elderly strongly supported Humphrey, the only blocs to do so.
>
> It is also telling that Ventura's vote, rooted in a majority of
> ballots cast by political independents, leaned distinctly to the left.
> He won a full one-third of Democrats voting, compared to 28 percent of
> the Republicans. And he got 44 percent of self-identified liberals,
> compared to just 29 percent of conservatives. What this shows is that
> the Republican Coleman held on to more of his base, mainly by bashing
> gays and harping on his pro-life position, while Humphrey experienced
> a near total meltdown in the face of Ventura's working-class populism.
> If anything, Ventura is Ross Perot with a happy face: sane, funny,
> self-deprecating, grounded in the reality of average people's lives
> (not a secluded billionaire surrounded by sycophants), a patriot but
> not a anti-foreigner demogague, a real libertarian who never tried to
> buy a politician or get a government subsidy (unlike Perot, who was a
> big donor to Nixon and other Washington insiders), focused not on the
> painful politics of belt-tightening but on the good-times of a budget
> surplus.
>
> Ventura's victory also owes a lot to Minnesota's progressive campaign
> finance laws, which limited both of the major party candidates to
> spending just $2.1 million each_keeping them from drowning Ventura
> out_and gave him enough money to get on the airwaves in the final two
> weeks. "I hope that this will show people what can be achieved when
> you can pare down the influence of money on the political system,"
> said Todd Paulson, executive director for Minnesota's Common Cause.
> "It's the closest thing I've ever seen to a revolution."
>
> And the major party candidates had no idea what hit them. On Election
> Night, as local reports showed Ventura in the lead with half the votes
> counted, Humphrey told people at his non-victory party "We're just
> coming around the corners. I think they're going to be showing a
> Humphrey victory." Across town, Coleman was telling his supporters to
> "keep the faith." Uh-huh. A day later, Dane Smith, the Star-Tribune's
> chief political reporter, said that local Democrats and Republicans
> had gone into hiding. "We can't find any of them today," he told NPR's
> All Things Considered. "They're not answering their phones."
>
> Apparently, the revolutionary character of Ventura's campaign has a
> lot of people freaked out, especially the media elites who keep
> telling us that there are only two flavors to choose from in politics,
> Bland A and Bland B. And their condescencion has been open.
> Interviewing Ventura, NBC's Tom Brokaw asked him if he should be
> addressed as "Governor Jesse Ventura, or Governor Jesse `The Body'
> Ventura." You could almost hear the snickers from the control room.
> The New York Times front-page story on his win couldn't resist poking
> fun at his roots in the pro-wrestling business either. Robert Scheer,
> a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a limousine liberal if there
> ever was one, said on his radio show on KCRW that "The people of
> Minnesota should be spanked for letting this happen." Even Hillary
> Rodham Clinton piled on with a disdainful reference to Ventura's
> "traveling road show." This isn't an attack on Ventura's lack of a
> detailed platform for what he will do as governor. It's a
> nose-held-high sneer at someone who didn't come up the conventional
> path, didn't go to an Ivy League school, likes to party and doesn't
> apologize for it_and whose success just proved how narrow-minded the
> elites really are.
>
> "The conventional analysis we're fed is that people are happy with
> politics and they like the politicians they have," says Patrick
> Caddell, onetime political adviser to a host of maverick Democrats
> ranging from Jimmy Carter to Jerry Brown. "Jesse Ventura suggests
> that's not true. The fact that he won is like a can opener. It says to
> other people in other states `why can't we have people like this?'.
> It's a dangerous example. His candidacy represents a threat to the
> established order, and so it's not surprising to see elites try to
> marginalize him at every point."
>
> One political leader who takes Ventura very seriously and respectfully
> is Paul Wellstone, the senior senator from Minnesota, who has also run
> and won two populist campaigns for office. (Not to mention that he is
> also a longtime wrestler, albeit of the amateur college variety.)
> "What I most appreciate about his campaign and victory is the
> downright anti-establishment part of it," Wellstone told me in a
> November 5 phone interview. "The message was `look, you gatekeepers
> who supposedly decide who can run, and who is viable and who is
> serious and who can win -we're going to take you on.' I like that. I
> also appreciate the political reform part [of Ventura's message],
> which was very much for real." When I told him liberals like Robert
> Scheer wanted to "spank" Minnesota, Wellstone immediately replied
> "That's ridiculous. That's a huge mistake. That's the same elitism
> that looks down on people, and gets liberals into big trouble that
> they deserve to be in."
>
> Wellstone was looking forward to sitting down with Ventura's
> staff_they've already called him to set up a meeting_and working
> together on areas of common agreement. But he expressed some concerns
> about the content of the Governor-elect's program, noting that
> populism has historically taken many forms, not all of them friendly.
> After acknowledging Ventura's opposition to corporate welfare, his
> support for public schools and his environmentalism, he pointed to
> some worries. "Please remember that during the campaign he also said
> to students in higher education, in community colleges, that if you're
> smart enough to get to college you're smart enough to pay for it.
> Community college students not needing help? Jeez! And he also said
> that he doesn't see a role for government to make child care more
> affordable. He's also talking about massive tax cuts while reducing
> class sizes. I'll be interested in seeing how you do that, how you
> invest in a commitment to children starting school ready to learn." I
> noted as well Ventura's announcement during the last weekend of the
> campaign that he opposed the idea of requiring government contractors
> to pay a "living wage," a hot issue in Minneapolis right now. "If
> those are the policies," Wellstone said with a growl, "I look forward
> to a vigorous debate."
>
> In the meantime, the genie is out of the bottle_and the two major
> parties are going to have a hell of a time stuffing it back in.