Jesse in 2012?
“I haven’t given a political speech in a while, but I felt this was the occasion to come out of retirement,” Jesse Ventura told a crowd of several thousand gathered in the Target Center arena on Tuesday for Ron Paul’s “Rally for the Republic.”
Wearing jeans, sneakers and a blazer, the iconoclastic former wrestler and governor of this state threw plenty of libertarian-independent meat to the raucous crowd, touching on the national debt, 9/11 and the Patriot Act. He defended third-party voting, arguing that “voting is not a horse race. You’re not going [to the polls] to pick the winner so you can brag to your friends.”
And when he reached his crescendo, he even sounded like a wrestler again, exhorting the crowd from the center of the ring. “I wrote the book ‘Don’t Start the Revolution without Me.’ Well, I’m here,” he said, as the masses rose to their feet. “If I see [people] start to rise up, and this country shows me it’s worth it, well then maybe in 2012. If I see it, then in 2012, we’ll give them a race they’ll never forget.”
It was the capstone of an afternoon when thousands of disaffected voters turned out to hear speech after libertarian speech, all leading up to an address from their hero, Ron Paul, who was scheduled to go on at 7:30, followed by a performance from Texas bluesman Jimmie Vaughn.
Organizers said they sold more than 10,000 tickets at $17.76 each, and gave away a few hundred more. Lines to enter stretched some 350 feet, by our count, along the second-floor skyways, with hundreds more queued up on the street-level sidewalks. Emcee Tucker Carlson, of MNSBC fame, emceed, saying, “It can be difficult calling a group of independent-minded people to order,” he added. And indeed it was, as the whole event got off the ground about 45 minutes late.
While there were plenty of conservative ideas on hand, there was no love lost for the Republican Party. President Bush “hasn’t done a single decent thing for the country,” said libertarian icon Lew Rockwell.
Author Tom Woods sure had one thing right: It was livelier than the real convention. “How much more fun are we going to have than those poor folks stuck at that snooze fest down the street?” he asked.
Wait till 2012, Tom.
