The good news – we don’t have Jesse Ventura to kick around anymore:<\/p>\n
Although his appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live” had all the trappings of an incipient campaign, Ventura squelched weeks of hinting that he was planning to enter the arena against Coleman, whose pro-Iraq war record he despises, and Franken, whom he has characterized as an opportunist<\/strong> for returning to Minnesota after years away to run for office.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ventura would be the precisely one person in the world who should not <\/em>call Franken an “opportunist”.<\/p>\n
Oh, yeah – and the good news:<\/p>\n
Late Monday, Dean Barkley said he might enter the race today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“I certainly am considering it,” he said. Ventura appointed Barkley to fill out the late Sen. Paul Wellstone’s unfinished term in 2002.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
While there might be fifteen or twenty Republicans who could get fooled by a Ventura candidacy, Barkley will draw not a single GOP vote.\u00a0 He’ll be yet another anchor around Franken’s neck.<\/p>\n
The other bit of good news?\u00a0 Priscilla, Lord Faris’ candidacy.\u00a0 Franken will have to fight Barkley on is “right”, and Lord Faris on his left.<\/p>\n
And the other, other bit of good news?\u00a0 Ventura could still <\/em>still take the plunge:<\/p>\n
The candidate filing period ends at 5 p.m. today.<\/p>\n
Ventura slyly left open the possibility of running if God spoke to him before then — one of several comments he made suggesting that religion has an undue influence in politics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And I have to confess – it would be so wonderful to have his big, bloated ego to kick around:<\/p>\n
The reason he isn’t going to run, he said, is the media. His daughter doesn’t want the attention his candidacy would focus on her, he said, and he didn’t relish having his motives unfairly attacked<\/strong> and second-guessed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You mean, you don’t want bloggers claiming that you’re only doing this for publicity?<\/p>\n
Yeah.\u00a0 Good call.<\/p>\n
“I was close to doing it,” he told King. “One part of me wanted to very badly. But when I spoke to my daughter and … she feared what would happen to her that happened to her brother, that put me over the top.<\/p>\n
“I thought, I will not put my family under that type of position again.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The good news – we don’t have Jesse Ventura to kick around anymore: Although his appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live” had all the trappings of an incipient campaign, Ventura squelched weeks of hinting that he was planning to enter the arena against Coleman, whose pro-Iraq war record he despises, and Franken, whom he has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}