Why Jesse Ventura Hates the Media and Why I Love Him. Jesse for Vice President?!

"Jesse Ventura does not like the media. In fact, itís safe to say that Jesse Ventura hates the media," says Chris Wright in The Boston Phoenix. In fact Ventura refused to speak to Minnesota media for much of his final year in office. "They stuck it to me, screwed me, abused me," he says. "The state of Minnesotaís media has dissed me forever."

From the beginning, at his inauguration, when Wright says Ventura let out "a warriorís cry that would make Howard Deanís notorious howl look like a lullaby," he did it his way. And now he's at Harvard Institute of Politics teaching a course called "Body Slamming the Political Establishment: Third Party Politics," that I sure wish I could take.

Not one to stand on pretense, he tells his students, "Sure, I smoked pot. If you grew up in the í60s and you didnít smoke pot, youíre either a liar or you didnít grow up in the í60s."

John Wodele, Ventura's gubernatorial press secretary says he won't forget that job for as long as he lives. As Wright notes, while Ventura was perhaps a PR person's worst nightmare, he also was a newswriter's dream. There were so many wonderful moments," says Jim Ragsdale, a political reporter for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. "To me, thatís what I lived for, those moments that revealed something about him. It was like having a regular guy in an important job. Once he came out from a meeting with the Dalai Lama. I said, ëWhat happened?í and he said, ëI asked him if heíd seen Caddyshack.í The Dalai Lama said, ëNo, I havenít seen that one.í This is the spiritual leader for half the world and thatís the question Ventura asks. It had no significance other than the fact that it was interesting to him."

Ventura says that after his teaching stint at harvard is over he wants to see if they'll accept him as an undergraduate student.

I have a better idea. I think he'd make a great vice-president on the Kerry ticket. And to quote Ventura, "this ain't shit."

Comments

Post a comment

Email this story to a friend

TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.whatsnextonline.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1493