FROM THE
OCTOBER 9, 2000 ISSUE

JONAH GOLDBERG
Body Slam

KATE O'BEIRNE
Clueless

n Conan the Barbarian — one of the few Arnold Schwarzenegger films Jesse Ventura wasn't in — a tired king enlists the aid of an able-bodied and uncouth warrior to defeat his enemy. Conan defeats the king's enemies, and later wins the throne himself. This is a lesson conservatives should keep in mind, because Jesse Ventura surely does.

Ventura, out with a new book which is probably the prelude to a presidential bid, is one of the most popular politicians in America. For conservatives, he is a useful ally on tax cuts and limited government. He speaks honestly about obvious things, which puts him at odds with the pieties of political correctness: He said, for example, that many lives could have been spared at Columbine if a school official had only carried a gun. Sure, he favors legalizing prostitution and decriminalizing most drugs, but even this magazine favors the latter. So why should conservatives be so wary?

Because, simply put, he is a barbarian: valuable in battle but unfit to rule in his own right. Of course, in America we don't have barbarians; we have populists. But the effect can be the same. Ventura is perfectly willing to smash any existing institution and tear down any established norm in pursuit of personal glory.

In his new book, Do I Stand Alone? Going to the Mat Against Political Pawns and Media Jackals, Ventura denounces the media for valuing sensationalism over substance. He assails their tendency to "portray every story as a battle." He inveighs against the "spin doctors," and condemns politicians who put their own interests above those of their constituents. In short, he stands foursquare against every trend in American politics that made his political career possible in the first place and sustains it today.

"I'm not writing this book to convince you of anything," he assures readers. "I'm writing it to ask for your help. I need you to help me wake up America." He continues: "The problem, as I see it, is that too many people are trying to tell us what to think . . . and we're letting them!" This sort of rabble-rousing has been the keynote of Ventura's career. He won the Minnesota governor's office — with 37 percent of the vote — by activating hordes of voters who normally couldn't be bothered with politics. He ran hilarious commercials of a Governor Ventura action figure smashing Evil Special Interest Man. Democrats assumed that Ventura would steal votes from the GOP candidate, but in fact, the Republican base held firm while the Democrats hemorrhaged votes to Ventura.

This explains why Ventura — for all his talk of being opposed to both parties — is vastly more comfortable taking nasty potshots at those to his right: It costs him fewer votes. When asked to defend, for example, his statement that religion is a "sham and a crutch for weak-minded people," he explained that he didn't mean all religious people, just religious conservatives. Oh, that's much less offensive.

Because Ventura is generally fawned over by the national media, he is quick to point out that he thinks the only real "media jackals" are the reporters who know him best in Minnesota. Conservatives concerned about media bias will find little solace in Ventura's analysis. The reason he thinks the national media "do a far better job" than local outlets is that they let Ventura say whatever he wants. And besides, Ventura assures national interviewers that he's not that serious anyway. Interviewed on The Today Show by Katie Couric, he told her, "We always put provocative titles on books. You have to, Katie, you know that, to sell them." Tim Russert, who's often superb but gets weak-kneed around Ventura, asked him why the media are jackals, and Ventura responded, "It's a great name. It fits good on the cover. And, you know, you have to be a little provocative because [we're] in the book business."

The Ventura persona is certainly provocative: Anyone who is critical of him is beneath contempt, anyone who disagrees with him does so for selfish reasons, and any institution which makes his job harder is "corrupt." Such indictments work, largely because his appeal is to people who don't normally pay attention to politics; he can therefore excite knee-jerk gripers without offering much substance.

Indeed, Ventura offers arguments that only people who don't know anything think are profound. "Bipartisan government," he writes, "was supposed to work as a system of checks and balances to help keep our government centered." Well, actually it wasn't "supposed" to do anything at all, considering the Founders fiercely opposed political parties. Ventura continues, "But the two parties have gotten so wrapped up in trying to stay in power that they no longer have any time for us and our concerns." Any time? Really?

There's no consistency from day to day, or from paragraph to paragraph. It's merely "straight-talk" rambling and canned outrage. If something makes the average guy angry, it makes Jesse angry too. He's stunned that "special interest hustlers" and "career self-promoters" have political agendas. He thinks it's outrageous that incumbents can campaign when they're supposed to be at work, but he thinks he's boldly bucking the system by having lavish for-profit book tours on the government's time. He's proud of being a zealous advocate for Minnesota, but is stunned that politicians and activists put their own constituencies above the national interest.

Ventura often sounds like a souped-up version of the Lonesome Rhodes character from Elia Kazan's brilliant 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, in which a backwoods rube masters television to exploit popular resentments. In an honest off-camera moment, Rhodes declares, "This whole country is like my flock a' sheep. Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers — everybody that's gotta jump when somebody else blows the whistle." Ventura's got these people on his side, but he's also got the moderately prosperous cubicle worker who isn't interested enough in politics to understand why government doesn't work as efficiently as his office mail room.

Ventura is willfully ignorant of the fact that most of the faults of the major parties stem from the fact that they are too democratic and too weak, not the reverse. One of the positive functions of political parties is to temper the demagogic spirit of people like Ventura in their own ranks. Untethered to any institution, Ventura is free to rant about the corruption of the cleanest political system in American history — and rave about his own courage for taking it on.

Candidates who exploit this facile outrage are nothing new; Adlai Stevenson once said an independent is a guy who wants to take the "politics out of politics," and that is certainly Ventura's schtick. His signature issue is to get rid of a whole house of the legislature, making Minnesota the second (after Nebraska) unicameral legislature in America. It's an interesting idea, and not without merit: Most upper legislatures in America were modeled on the U.S. Senate, in that representation was based not on population but on communities. The Supreme Court's one-man, one-vote rulings have made such systems unconstitutional, and made some legislative bodies redundant.

This is an ideal Ventura issue, because it's purely procedural. It's not about budget priorities or social issues, but about efficiency — and thus sounds great in soundbites. The image it invokes is the smashing down of barriers in the way of the people. And it's working for Ventura politically. But here, too, his approach is slash-and-burn; he says any legislator who disagrees with him is doing so purely out of greed, and any journalist who is critical is illegitimate for one reason or another.

This is an approach we don't need in national politics, and conservatives should not be afraid to say so.