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It was all so fat and wonderful you almost wanted to move to the Minnesota tundra and forget questions about whether Jesse can govern or whether tripartisan politics will be a fetid swamp. You also wanted to forget that Jesse kept speaking in bromides and stuck to a schedule of at least one head-smackingly dumb remark daily, reminding everyone that hoo-yah! is awfully close to yahoo.
His own advisory committee wondered whether to muzzle him after Ventura mused that his wife ought to collect a state paycheck for running the mansion and planning soirees. But Jesse's appeal to voters was that he comes unwrapped, so the advisers left him to his ways.
Columnists will be ever grateful. During a one-hour call-in show on radio, Ventura, who's been a small-town mayor and a Twin Cities shock jock, said he liked tackling issues with a philosophy he calls KISS. It stands for "Keep it simple and stupid."
In a visit to the University of Minnesota, Jesse talked about honesty and integrity to thousands of raving students and then abruptly shifted gears: "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat." It was Jesse's wrestling slogan, and it might work in poker and horse racing, but you hoped someone was around to begin heart massage on the university regents.
"I think the very fact that Jesse won because of his celebrity is most distressing," says Steve Schier, a political-science professor at Carleton College. "There was this generational appeal for a wrestler by young voters who never cast a ballot before. It was not clear if they cared whether he could do the job."
There are no great mysteries here, professor. Here is exactly what voters care about:
Nothing going on in American politics connects with them in any way. They turn on the television and can't tell if they're watching a Hair Club commercial or another impeachment hearing. They listen to the crafted drone of national and state party blather, and their eyes roll back.
Then comes Jesse.
"Kids who work in my office with rings in their noses and blue hair wanted to know how to register to vote," says Sandra Gardebring, a University of Minnesota administrator.
Ventura is nothing like anybody who ever passed this way, so it's hard to make predictions, but that's part of his appeal. And however things turn out, he can't be worse than the other hyenas in high places. "Isn't politics 90% showmanship anyway?" asks Jim Murphy, a tattooed bouncer at Billy's on Grand, a St. Paul bar.
At the University of Minnesota, students said they voted for Ventura even though he had told them to quit looking for government handouts and put themselves through school. "I agree with him," said Andrew Labonte, 21, an advertising major who works 30 hours a week.
So does Jerome Wagner, a 75-year-old former science teacher who shrugged off a 40-below chill factor to attend Ventura's swearing-in. "He's got the physical presence to take the two little guys next to him and say, 'Hey, could you guys stop this? Let's go down the middle of the road.'"
And here's how he might do that: