For the benefit of all of you who were either not in Minnesota, or were too young to remember:  Before Jesse Ventura started his career making skepticism look moronic and trite, he was governor of Minnesota.

No kidding!  It’s like 37% of Minnesotans went to parties on election day, got really really hammered on cheap beer and loaded up on Taco Bell burritos, and decided “What the hey, let’s vote for a wrestler!  Duuuuude!  Hahahahaha!”

And while he will not go down in history as our least-successful governor – the economy obliged him by staying nice ‘n successful until just before he left office – he will go down in history as one of the closest calls Minnesota ever had.

“What do you mean, Mitch?”

I mean, if he’d gotten his way, V he’da bollixed things up so bad…

Ventura, who called the four years “a life experience beyond belief,” said his greatest failure was not consolidating Minnesota’s two houses of its Legislature into one body — unicameral. He pushed the issue heavily during his tenure, but it never came to fruition.

Think state government is a hopeless mess today?

From the Baltimore Sun’s “Ring Posts”:

Is there anything that you wanted to accomplish as governor that you didn’t?

Oh, yeah. My biggest failure was not getting a vote on unicameral – one house state legislature. We don’t need two houses. Nebraska is the only state that has unicameral, and in their 70- or 80-year existence of it, they’ve never had a special session due to the fact that they couldn’t find a conclusion to their budget.

That’s right, Jesse.  That’s just what we need; for government to pound out mo bigga budgets like crap through a goose.

And while I try to stay away from rhetoric like ” so and so was the stupidest moron who ever wandered to the head of the class”, if you read carefully between the lines  you can probably tell that that’s what I’d be saying about our former Governor, if I were to write such things.

But it’s a good thing I don’t say things like that:

At the state level, we do not need two houses. In fact it violates the Constitution because it’s supposed to be one person, one vote, but because you have two houses you have one person, two votes, because you have an elected representative and a senator.

{{facepalm}}

Anyway – all you conspiracy buffs out there?  He’ll be bringing that keen intellect to your field, now.

My condolences.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 7:05 am and is filed under Minnesota Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.