Word: venturas
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During the campaign, Ventura was quoted as musing aloud about legalizing prostitution. On the record, he denied favoring such a move but added, "Ladies and gentlemen, you cannot legislate stupidity. People are going to do stupid things. We cannot sit and every time someone does something stupid, make it a law and have the government come in, because if you do that, you're going to lose your freedoms." The macho former wrestler had this to say about why he favored gay rights: "Love is bigger than government...
...most potent weapon in Ventura's triumph was his up-the-Establishment attitude, his platform quotations from such political thinkers as Jerry Garcia and Jim Morrison, his TV commercial showing him as an Action Figure doll doing battle with the Evil Special Interest Man. ("I don't want your stupid money," growls the Ventura doll.) Some may call it the Revenge of the Couch Potatoes, but Ventura's campaign galvanized younger Minnesotans. They swarmed to the polls to register and vote on Election Day--Minnesota law allows same-day registration--in such numbers that some polling places...
Democratic state representative Myron Orfield ruefully concedes Ventura's extrapolitical appeal: "Jesse isn't just a former wrestler. He's a cultural phenomenon. He's connected to the modern vernacular of things here. He's with...
...also poised to take command of the very power structure he so vividly and colorfully ran against. The number of his Reform Party allies in the state government is exactly zero. During the campaign, when he was asked how, if elected, he would deal with Democratic and Republican legislators, Ventura would roll up a sleeve, flex a bicep and rumble, "This is how." Good theater, but not a terribly plausible plan for running a government...
...Ventura is plainly not the knucklehead he has sometimes, to please the crowds, pretended to be. The question is not whether he can learn on the job--say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done, make nice when political advantage and simple prudence dictate such a course--but whether doing so will put him at odds with his own freewheeling nature. Minnesotans and the nation at large can look forward to the unusual spectacle of a man wrestling with himself...