Body Slam — Jesse Ventura

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But the 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 ran out of ballots and had to run off copies. This surge of new voters explains why Minnesota's 61% election turnout was the highest in the nation.

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 it."

He's 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.

In a somewhat pained editorial after the election, the Star Tribune urged citizens to be calm, legislators to be cooperative and the Governor-elect to mend his ways: "The scorn for government he voiced during the campaign was one part ideology, one part showmanship and several parts ignorance. He can't get away with the ignorance any longer."

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.

--Reported by Kermit Pattison/St. Paul and Ron Stodghill II/Minneapolis