Ready To Rumble

By Steve Lopez/St. Paul

Jesse Ventura wakes up on another below-zero morning in St. Paul, Minn., and looks around the room.

Yep. He's still in the nine-bedroom, seven-fireplace Tudor mansion. He must still be the Governor.

What a week!

The man who used to drop people on their head for a living, and is now doing the same to the two-party system, puts on a pair of lime green Lycra shorts, a white T shirt and some New Balance sneakers. He still doesn't know what's behind every door of the sprawling three-story Governor's manse with the four-room kitchen, but he knows the gym is somewhere upstairs.

His wife Terry, who was much more comfortable on their horse farm, is on a treadmill when Jesse gets there. She tells him how to kick-start the other one, whose dashboard rivals the space shuttle's.

While working up a 20-minute sweat, Jesse ("the Body") trashes the press, talks budget strategy, shares foreign-policy views and taunts a former pro-wrestling nemesis named Jerry ("the King") Lawler.

"I hope we're not over [teenage son] Ty's room," the First Lady of Minnesota says as the floor quakes under her 6-ft. 4-in., 260-lb. husband.

"It's all right," the sweaty Governor responds in a voice as muscular as his 18-in. biceps. "He's woke us up enough times."

Nearly 2 1/4 centuries into the American experiment, it's not always clear which way the Republic is headed. But in a year that began with career politicians wrestling in Washington and a career wrestler politicking in Minnesota, we may finally have found True North.

On Monday the Reform Party Governor and former wrestling bad boy in a feather boa asked Minnesotans to continue setting a national example for civic participation (roughly 60% of registered voters cast their ballots in November, in contrast to 36% nationally) and ended his inaugural speech with the Navy SEAL rally cry "Hoo-yah!"

On Tuesday he met face-to-face with the house speaker, a Republican, to partner a proposed $1 billion tax rebate.

On Wednesday he appointed three department heads--one Democrat, one Republican, one Reform Party member.

Ventura, who pulled off a stunning upset in November by tapping into public disgust over militant partisanship, is all over the place. He's a third-party Governor who has Republicans running one chamber and Democrats the other, so nobody knows how it will all work.

And so far nobody cares.

Shaved heads have become a fashion trend. Nearly 14,000 seats for the Jan. 16 inaugural party at the sports arena were gone in little more than a day. Jesse action figures are on order. Business has picked up at Navy recruiting centers. Thirteen hundred business leaders gave Ventura a standing ovation. A college crowd yelled for a band to get off the stage so the Governor could come out. The World Wrestling Federation rushed out a commemorative video titled The Mouth, the Myth, the Legend. And a capitol lobbyist said Ventura doesn't have the foggiest notion how government works.

It was all so fat and wonderful you almost wanted to move to the Minnesota tundra and forget questions about whether Jesse can govern or whether tripartisan politics will be a fetid swamp. You also wanted to forget that Jesse kept speaking in bromides and stuck to a schedule of at least one head-smackingly dumb remark daily, reminding everyone that hoo-yah! is awfully close to yahoo.

His own advisory committee wondered whether to muzzle him after Ventura mused that his wife ought to collect a state paycheck for running the mansion and planning soirees. But Jesse's appeal to voters was that he comes unwrapped, so the advisers left him to his ways.

Columnists will be ever grateful. During a one-hour call-in show on radio, Ventura, who's been a small-town mayor and a Twin Cities shock jock, said he liked tackling issues with a philosophy he calls KISS. It stands for "Keep it simple and stupid."

In a visit to the University of Minnesota, Jesse talked about honesty and integrity to thousands of raving students and then abruptly shifted gears: "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat." It was Jesse's wrestling slogan, and it might work in poker and horse racing, but you hoped someone was around to begin heart massage on the university regents.

"I think the very fact that Jesse won because of his celebrity is most distressing," says Steve Schier, a political-science professor at Carleton College. "There was this generational appeal for a wrestler by young voters who never cast a ballot before. It was not clear if they cared whether he could do the job."

There are no great mysteries here, professor. Here is exactly what voters care about:

Nothing going on in American politics connects with them in any way. They turn on the television and can't tell if they're watching a Hair Club commercial or another impeachment hearing. They listen to the crafted drone of national and state party blather, and their eyes roll back.

Then comes Jesse.

"Kids who work in my office with rings in their noses and blue hair wanted to know how to register to vote," says Sandra Gardebring, a University of Minnesota administrator.

Ventura is nothing like anybody who ever passed this way, so it's hard to make predictions, but that's part of his appeal. And however things turn out, he can't be worse than the other hyenas in high places. "Isn't politics 90% showmanship anyway?" asks Jim Murphy, a tattooed bouncer at Billy's on Grand, a St. Paul bar.

At the University of Minnesota, students said they voted for Ventura even though he had told them to quit looking for government handouts and put themselves through school. "I agree with him," said Andrew Labonte, 21, an advertising major who works 30 hours a week.

So does Jerome Wagner, a 75-year-old former science teacher who shrugged off a 40-below chill factor to attend Ventura's swearing-in. "He's got the physical presence to take the two little guys next to him and say, 'Hey, could you guys stop this? Let's go down the middle of the road.'"

And here's how he might do that:

"Jesse was a brawling-type, punch-and-kick kind of guy, and he had this big flying elbow drop," says wrestler Lawler, the man who nearly broke comedian Andy Kaufman's neck with a pile driver. Now that politics and pro wrestling have melded, Lawler is contemplating a run for mayor of Memphis, Tenn.

There may be no more appropriate lab in which to study the Jesse phenomenon than the Mall of America, which is referred to by all six or seven cynics in Minnesota as the Fall of America. On an upper level there's a Planet Hollywood next to a Hooters. Several Hooters waitresses are split on Jesse's virtues.

Erin wouldn't even have voted if not for Jesse, but Trista wasn't that impressed. A third waitress, not crazy about either Jesse or being a Hooters girl, asked TIME to make up a name for her. O.K., we can do that. "I think it's stupid to cut tuition credits," said Bambi. "And all he ever talks about is how he was a Navy SEAL."

At the other end of the Mall of America, Sandra Freese is buying a Jesse's World Order T shirt for her son Travis' 10th birthday. "He's starting to ask a lot of questions about politics," she says, drawn by his interest in Ventura.

How can this be a bad thing?

You need go no further than room 315 in the capitol for an answer to that question. During the campaign, a Ventura TV ad depicted a Jesse action figure beating up Evil Special Interest Man. Room 315 is Evil Special Interest Man's office, and several hundred of his clones work there.

"I'm a skeptic," said a lobbyist who paled at the thought of giving his name. It's especially important that a novice like Ventura hear the needs of farmers, truck drivers, doctors, teachers, etc., the lobbyist said. "It takes more than sound bites to run a state with a $20 billion budget."

Guess how many lobbyists have tried to get to see Ventura. Over 200, Jesse says. And how many has he met with?

"None."

But he has surrounded himself with people who know what they're doing, and he was working 12-to-14-hour days last week boning up on government dreck and going to meetings. And he relentlessly preaches self-sufficiency. "Government cannot be your parent," Ventura said on a radio talk show when callers complained that they couldn't afford housing or insurance.

It remains to be seen, of course, how long the big guy can tell struggling Minnesotans to fend for themselves while he drives his Porsche out to the 32-acre horse ranch, the Governor's mansion or the lake cabin. But the truth is, it's going to be hard for him to screw things up.

The Minnesota economy is good, expected budget surpluses are huge, and legislators all face re-election in the year 2000. "If they buck me," Jesse says, "the public may say, 'Hey, let's throw the bums out.'"

Ventura met last week with house speaker Steve Sviggum, a Republican, on the house's $1 billion tax-rebate plan. Sviggum brought another legislator with him. Jesse had four staff members on his side, armed with background.

So who did the talking?

Jesse.

"I was impressed with his ability to take control of the meeting," Sviggum said. "He's going to be wonderful to work with."

As for the Gov, he's feelin' good. He compares himself to Rocky, to Muhammad Ali, to Viking quarterback Randall Cunningham, who resurrected a dead career.

Any regrets after a week in the job?

Hoo-yah! Dumb question. Like Jesse told the kids at U.M., if a guy like him could be elected Governor, anything's possible.

"Tourism's gonna go up," he says. "People are going to come to Minnesota just to look at the people who voted me in."

--With reporting by Autumn De Leon and Kermit Pattison

With reporting by Autumn De Leon and Kermit Pattison