I doubt that Jesse Ventura will be remembered as a great Midwestern populist like Nebraska's William Jennings Bryan. But then again, Bryan made a bigger spectacle of himself against Clarence Darrow at the Scopes monkey trial grudge match than Mr. Ventura ever did performing pile drivers in the professional wrestling ring while wearing a pink feather boa.
When he announced last Tuesday that he won't be seeking a second four-year term as Minnesota's governor, this often cartoonlike symbol of my state wrote the end of an unusual civics lesson that should remain in the history books long after the more conventional Midwestern populists have disappeared into graduate students' footnotes.
While it has yet to be proved that any American child can grow up to be president, Jesse Ventura has proved that anybody can be governor. More important, he has shown that anybody is actually able to govern -- even someone whose last business partner was Adrian Adonis, the wrestling tag-team champion. Clocks at the State Capitol haven't run backward. Bills are still being passed and vetoed. And the governor has actually had an agenda, big parts of which he was able to push through.
When he appeared without an invitation at a candidate forum during the 1998 campaign, Mr. Ventura told voters, "You're going to find me a little different from the other candidates." He's tried to live up to that promise and to the commercials that may have won him the governorship in 1998: kids playing with a Ventura action figure as he did battle with Evil Special Interest Man. In 1999 he and the State Legislature agreed on a $2.9 billion tax relief program. In 2001 $791 million was sent back to Minnesota citizens in the third straight year of sales tax rebates. And Governor Ventura could face down controversy: he vetoed a 2000 bill that would have required a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions.
At the start he outlined goals he dubbed his Big Plan -- to manage the state's industrial growth, increase employment, streamline government and sell Minnesota to a world that knew us only as home to the country's largest shopping mall and the airport where one could buy "Our governor can beat up your governor" T-shirts. He didn't do much worse than other governors who had boom times, now followed by recession.
Mr. Ventura also proved that Everyman could be as petty as the usual politicians. He feuded with the Legislature and, calling himself the Samurai Governor, eviscerated budgets proposed by legislators. He tried (and failed) to halve the number of legislators by lobbying for a unicameral system. He also had a Spiro Agnew-esque loathing of reporters, whom he called jackals.
He often went too far: maligning the designers of St. Paul, on the David Letterman show, as drunk Irishmen; telling Playboy he'd like to be reincarnated as a brassiere; doing color commentary for the XFL, a league that was equal parts bad football and cheerleaders dressed like strippers at Tony Soprano's hangout, the Bada Bing club. But did vulgarity stall the ascent of career politicians like Huey Long and Lyndon Johnson?
Mr. Ventura's vulgarity could be ignored, but only for so long. Meanwhile, fallout from his policies has hurt him too -- Minnesota's sudden deficit crisis is at least partly attributable to his budget policies. Mr. Ventura, nothing if not a showman, knows his sui generis vaudeville act is dead. In July 1999 his approval rating was 73 percent; in March 2002 it was 43 percent. The day after state employees went on strike last fall, he left town to fly to New York to inspect ground zero on ABC's tab. That may have been good for "Good Morning America," but at home the Jesse show was over.
Now, like a model Jeffersonian democrat, Jesse Ventura will return to private life after his short spell as a citizen-politician. While Thomas Jefferson probably imagined educated burghers returning to their plantations, Mr. Ventura is thinking in 21st-century terms. His agents, he said, "are fielding any and all offers."