The chief executive managed to squeeze these trips in alongside a demanding schedule of out-of-state events and interviews with the national media, nearly all of which portrayed him to his advantage. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his peripatetic ways, poll numbers showed his voter approval rating near 70 percent.
Then, however, the conquering hero came home--and confronted a legislature in which the cheers and the publicity meant very little. Just as Jesse Ventura was returning from his successful visit to outstate Minnesota, lawmakers began shredding his agenda, one item at a time. Light rail subsidies, unicameral legislative reform, even the confirmation of a top Cabinet official--all these initiatives were either dead or dying.
For some celebrity politicians, that might not matter. Idolized by the voters and fawned over by the national press, they would simply treat legislation as a low priority.
Jesse Ventura, however, is different. From the moment he took office, he has been determined not only to reign but to govern: to leave his imprint on the policies and political system of his state. Even as he basks in public adulation, he is hard at work on a reform package commonly referred to as the "Big Plan." It is indeed a big plan, ambitious and far-reaching enough that to call it anything else is to miss the point.
Jesse Ventura wants to rewrite Minnesota's tax code, redesign the health care and K-12 education systems, develop a set of principles for "Smart Growth," and rework economic development and telecommunications policy. He is preparing, as he himself immodestly describes it, an answer to the whole dilemma of what role the state should play in people's lives.
Since it is still a work in progress, not set for full-blown, official release until early next year, many of the details of the Plan have yet to be publicly revealed. But it is already clear that its success or failure will ultimately define the Ventura administration.
To succeed with his bold program, Minnesota's governor will have to become something considerably more than Jesse the Celebrity, or even, as he sometimes calls himself, Jesse the Mind. He will have to become Jesse the Strategist. He will have to deal with the question that has hounded him ever since his startling upset victory in 1998: Can he really govern? It is a question that may not be answered for quite a while.
Ventura brings to his office and to his mission several very important assets. Elected almost entirely on the strength of his own larger-than-life personality and fame, he owes no political debts. As the state's lone officeholder from a fractured and disorganized Reform party, he has no identifiable constituencies to answer to--partisan, interest group or otherwise. In other words, Ventura is the rare officeholder who is singularly free of any political constraints and in possession of a seemingly bottomless reservoir of political capital.
"He doesn't care if he gets reelected. His life doesn't revolve around politics or political office," says Dave Jennings, a former Republican House Speaker who served briefly in the Ventura administration. "Unlike some elected officials who are mindful not just of this office but the next, and not just of this election but the next, this guy doesn't think that way. That changes all the rules."
In trying to implement a program, Minnesota's governor doesn't really have longstanding enemies or rivals of the sort that conventional leaders accumulate over decades in politics. He faces a different sort of enemy--himself.
Ventura is far more politically astute than is generally recognized, yet he is remarkably undisciplined and injudicious in picking his fights. Some of them--such as the controversy surrounding his remarks last year about the nature of organized religion--might be chalked up to the hazards of his exceptional candor. Others, however, are so petty or absurd as to defy explanation. Only in the Ventura administration, for example, could a staffer be brazen--or stupid-- enough to accompany the governor on a tour of highway-loving rural Minnesota wearing a fluorescent button that read, "Anybody who opposes light rail can kiss my ..."
Most often, though, Ventura's scrapes with controversy are of his own creation. He refused, for example, to issue proclamations declaring a day of prayer and celebrating the accomplishments of veterans, citing a desire to limit the number of official state-sponsored pronouncements. Yet he signed one establishing "Rolling Stones Day."
The local press is another frequent target of what seems to be gratuitous insult. Few politicians ever lose points with the public for bashing the media, but few ever accomplish anything as ambitious as a Big Plan without cultivating at least some significant home-state media support. Ventura either doesn't recognize this or doesn't care.
Among the national reporters who shower him with soft, fawning attention, the governor is witty, charming and, above all else, available. At home, where the coverage is far more substantive-- although sometimes haughty and condescending--he is considerably less warm and accessible. For the most part, he refuses interviews with the statehouse press corps. Last year, when one local reporter queried him about farm policy, he told her to "go get a glass of milk."
Legislators are accorded about the same amount of respect. During his insurgent 1998 campaign, Ventura effectively utilized the legislature as a foil for his plain-spoken populist message. While lawmakers didn't like it, few took him seriously enough to care. Either way, they tacitly understood the criticism to be within the boundaries of legitimate political gamesmanship. Once he took office, many figured, the bashing would come to an end. It didn't.
If anything, it got a little worse. Ventura is not alone among governors in his disdain for the legislative branch, but he stands apart for the sheer frequency and volume of his attacks. His ongoing assault has been so relentless, in fact, that the local radio station that hosts his weekly "Lunch with the Governor" show felt compelled to give legislators their own program afterward to defend themselves. "You have to remember he's earned his living by playing the bad guy. In wrestling, he had to insult people right away," says University of Minnesota political scientist Virginia Gray. "His attitude is total confrontation."
In sum, the debate in St. Paul these days isn't whether or not Jesse Ventura has the political capital necessary to bring his Big Plan to life. He has that. The topic of debate is whether he will squander it all first.
Ask veterans of state government the first thing they noticed about the Jesse era, and they will tell you it was the remarkable Cabinet he assembled. In the initial test of his judgment, the former wrestler and part-time suburban mayor passed with flying colors, surprising admirers and detractors alike by the depth and quality of his nominees.
With literally no connections to the state political establishment, Ventura was free to pick anyone he wanted. He gave explicit directions to his transition team to find the best and the brightest administrators--regardless of ideology and partisan background--and they did exactly that.
A year later, as he barnstormed outstate, he was still talking about how well the process had gone. "My style," he told a standing-room- only crowd in Paynesville, "is to hire the best person available for the job and then get out of the way. It wasn't about, `Oh, you worked on the campaign? Well, we've got a job for you.' Never once did we ask what their party affiliation was because I did not care."
The result was a politically diverse group of experienced public officials and private-sector executives that, by nearly all accounts, didn't have a hack among the bunch. Almost a third of the 25 agency heads who launched the Ventura regime were holdovers from the outgoing Republican administration. Michael O'Keefe, named to head the $5.5 billion Department of Human Services, came from the McKnight Foundation, where he managed one of the nation's largest grantmaking institutions. Jan Malcolm, Ventura's health commissioner, was a highly regarded private health care executive.
The new governor also showed that he held no grudges. Finance Commissioner Pam Wheelock, for example, was drawn from the inner circle of Ventura's 1998 Republican opponent, St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman. Former state senator Ted Mondale, who ran for governor unsuccessfully on the Democratic side, was chosen to head the Metropolitan Council, an influential Twin Cities regional agency that oversees transportation and land-use decisions.
"He's assembled the best Cabinet Minnesota has seen in 25 years," says Lyle Wray, president of the Citizens League, a Minneapolis-based good-government watchdog. "He picked the best in the field from the Democratic, Republican and independent parties. Other governors could never do that."
Nor would many of his predecessors have been comfortable with the managerial approach that is the Ventura hallmark: enunciating a broad vision of how government should interact with its citizens and then delegating an unusually high level of authority to his commissioners to fill in the details. "He's very much of a Reagan-style delegator," says Dean Barkley, a Ventura confidant who is the director of the Planning Department. "He really relies on those 25 managers he brought in to do their jobs."
Agency chiefs aren't simply given a long leash. They are empowered to speak for the administration and expected to generate their own policy initiatives. Turf battles between divisions are frowned upon. Inter- agency collaboration is demanded. "There's almost a requirement that we address issues across agency lines," says Kit Hadley, the Housing and Finance commissioner. "I've spent more time in the last 12 months discussing important policy matters with other commissioners that I did in all the four-and-a-half years I was a commissioner in the previous administration."
Despite his overheated, bureaucracy-bashing campaign rhetoric, Ventura in office has been no indiscriminate critic of government in general. After his election, Ventura made it a point to visit and greet employees in every state agency. During monthly cabinet meetings, he is respectful, solicitous and a quick study. "He listens more than he talks, which is not the persona he shows to the public," says Jennings, who was head of the Commerce Department in 1999. "It's sort of like what you think happens in a cabinet meeting when you learn about government in high school civics class."
Minnesota's political establishment couldn't--and still can't--quite figure out what to make of Ventura. He talked tough about personal responsibility, yet surprised social services advocates with generous funding. He publicly excoriated college students seeking more state aid, but ended up delivering it to them anyway. In his 1998 campaign, he dismissed the state health insurance program as "socialized medicine." A year later, he safeguarded it from attempts to reduce the tax that pays for it. "His bravado is not a very good guide to what his actions are, so that makes him tough to figure out in terms of policy," explains Virginia Gray. "What he says is not a predictor of what he's going to do on policy issues."
Ventura's early initiatives were almost as successful as his Cabinet was impressive. Working with a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic Senate, the new governor hewed to the center in 1999 and walked away with a record $2.9 billion in tax relief--including the largest tax cut in state history. By the end of his maiden legislative session, Ventura had also won a hard-fought $60 million for light rail, helped create tobacco settlement endowments totaling $968 million, and signed off on the largest increase in per-pupil school spending in a decade.
While he didn't achieve every item on his agenda, Ventura came as close to a perfect score as any rookie governor could reasonably expect. He won on nearly all the issues that mattered, despite lacking a single party ally in the legislature. Virtually everyone who had ridiculed his credentials wound up admitting they had underestimated the man. "Politicians often become too politically correct and milquetoast, so his boldness is appreciated," says House Speaker Steve Sviggum. "His boldness is a breath of fresh air for the institution."
But that was last year. Or more precisely, it was last spring, as the new governor wrapped up his triumphant first session. Ever since then, when it comes to state capitol politics, virtually everything has gone wrong for him.
Much of the problem can be traced back to a series of vetoes that he handed down last May, shortly after the session gaveled to conclusion. Ventura blindsided the House and Senate by using his line item veto to strip $160 million from provisions in more than 40 bills.
To the stunned legislators who had worked around the clock to craft deals and secure votes to fund the governor's light rail proposal, that unexpected maneuver was bad enough. Making matters worse, Ventura rubbed their faces in it by accompanying the vetoes with a red pig stamp--to signify the spending provisions as pork. He then departed for the West Coast on a two-day book promotion tour.
"Many legislators, particularly from rural areas, were furious. They felt they were ambushed. The trust with the governor was broken," says Ember Reichgott Junge, the Senate's assistant majority leader. "Now I sense the relationship is very different. Legislators are not as afraid to speak up as much."
That's an understatement. Wary of last year's veto spectacle, both parties began this year's session determined not to be taken for patsies again. One measure of the festering ill will surfaced right away, when House and Senate leaders prepared contingency plans to recess a week earlier than usual--that way, if Ventura sandbags them again, they will still have a few days available to return to the capitol to respond.
But the mood at the statehouse hasn't just been defensive--it's been vindictive. First, the House Republican majority announced its intention to rescind support for the governor's pet project--the Minneapolis-area light rail line. Then the Senate delivered its own payback. Striking close to Ventura's heart, the upper chamber took the highly unusual step of rejecting the confirmation of one of his Ventura's top agency heads--the first time in a quarter-century that a major gubernatorial appointee had been rejected.
In part, the Senate's action was an objection to Ventura's plans for the agency. Last summer, without consulting the legislature, he decided to merge the existing departments of Commerce and Public Service into a single reorganized unit. But it was the governor's choice to head the new agency, then-Public Service chief Steve Minn, who really rankled the Senate. Clearly qualified, but viewed by many legislators as a student of the Ventura school of legislative relations--that is, arrogant, dismissive and heavy-handed--Minn never had a chance. In the end, the confirmation vote wasn't even close-- Minn was rejected by a 2-1 margin.
That lopsided loss foreshadowed an even more humbling defeat on an issue critically important to Ventura--a constitutional amendment to create a unicameral or single-house legislature. Ever since taking office, Ventura has been on a quixotic mission in favor of a measure to place the issue on this fall's ballot. It was not only his signature reform for the current session but a major component of the still-to-be-finalized Big Plan. Even though it had support from some key lawmakers, the proposal never made it out of a House committee.
Legislators had lots of reasons to reject a unicameral, among them the simple fact that few wanted to vote their jobs out of existence. But there was no mistaking that, in this instance, the opposition had an acutely personal dimension to it. House and Senate members of both parties simply concluded that giving the governor his comeuppance was well worth the political risk of resisting both him and the majority of Minnesotans who had told pollsters that they wanted to vote on the unicameral idea. "Why would I work with the governor on this," asked one legislator, "when we get nothing?"
More than anything else, the unicameral vote underscored the depth of the animosity toward Ventura, as well as his isolation and estrangement from the political establishment. "The governor operates as `me against them,'" says Junge. "He'll criticize the legislature while we're standing there at a press conference backing his idea."
While all of Ventura's recent setbacks have been grounded in policy differences, they also have shared another trait--each was, to a certain extent, avoidable. Even the unicameral question, on which the divide between Ventura and the legislature was greatest, might have seen a different resolution had the governor shown lawmakers even a minimum of courtesy. While there's no guarantee that the bill would have passed, its chances of getting a full hearing and floor vote would have been much greater.
"He sees himself as the CEO and they as his vice-presidents who should do his bidding," says Jennings. "They, on the other hand, see themselves as the board of directors. There is a disconnect there."
That disconnect appears to be growing wider by the day. If Ventura has been chastened by his recent experience, he doesn't let it show. His response to the newly emboldened legislature has been to sharpen, rather than to temper, his criticism. After the Steve Minn confirmation battle, for example, he described his legislative antagonists as "butt-kissing" insiders. After the unicameral vote, they were "gutless cowards."
By then, legislators had become inured to the governor's bomb- throwing. Some even lobbed a few of their own. Representative Greg Davids, who had publicly described the governor as a "moron," later clarified his remarks with this statement. "I have to first apologize to all the morons. I respect the office of the governor, but not the current governor."
It wasn't long before lawmakers were making sport of the governor's intemperate remarks, with some appearing on the House floor wearing buttons that read, "Gutless Coward."
This time, if anyone was offended, it was Ventura. When, during a televised policy forum, he was touched on the sleeve by button-wearing Carol Molnau, who chairs the House Transportation Finance Committee, the governor snapped, "Don't touch me." Several days later, during his radio show, Ventura suggested he had been sexually harassed.
Small spats, to be sure, but ones that may presage the fate of the Big Plan and, with it, Ventura's administration. "Somewhere in the bowels of the state capitol is a plan that will change state government," says Dave Jennings. "Because of his astounding popularity, the expectations are high.... The expectation is getting so large that they may never be able to meet it."
