My Joke with Jesse

My dust-up with Jesse Ventura, at the very beginning of his term as Minnesota governor in 1999, remains my high watermark of fame. For the rest of my life, I will always be the unnamed reporter in the parenthetical statement in the footnote to the sentence in the entry on this governor’s testy relations with the press. So I was glad to relive the episode when Jim Ragsdale of the St. Paul Pioneer Press was gathering anecdotes at the very end of Ventura’s term in January 2003.

It was at that time that Jesse was facing the first setback of his young administration, the resignation of his first major appointment, DNR commish Alan Horner, after it was revealed he'd been busted a couple times for hunting and fishing without a license (and made things worse by referring to DNR conservation officers as "crappie cops"). 

But to this naïve young reporter from the Northwoods, the significance of that press conference in January 1999 was that it was the first opportunity to josh Jesse since his rousing inauguration concert, during which, you'll recall, he sang a painfully tone-deaf version of "Werewolves of London" with the very obliging Warren Zevon. I had covered the event for the Northland's Newspaper and enjoyed the spirit of it. I wanted to give the guv a bit of a verbal high-five to show that I appreciated the unorthodox approach. But, so as not to appear to be a bootlicker, I would have to give him a good-natured ribbing.

So after Jesse and Horner finished their comments, after Jesse very gruffly took a minimal amount of questions and suggested that Horner had been the victim of unfairly intense media scrutiny, after Jesse ended the press conference and began lumbering back to the door into his office, when the TV cameras had turned off their spotlights, I lobbed out my joke (imagine my voice cracking like a high school sophomore):

"Governor, after singing with Warren Zevon, are you considering singing lessons?"

The media horde made a low hooting noise as if I had just insulted his mother. "Why is everybody reacting that way?" I thought nervously. Jesse stopped in his tracks and turned around. I had my first intimations that I might have misread He stopped in his tracks. He came back to the lectern and glared. The cameras flipped their lights back on. He fumed. 

"I don't know, are you?" was his first, childish attempt at a comeback. Then he tried again. "That (concert) was about having fun, so, that's what that was about. ..." followed by some martyrlike comment about how, if some people think he ought to be criticized for having a little fun, well, then, fine. He wasn't looking at me; he was looking over me at the rows of reporters and TV cameras behind me. Then he stormed off.

I scurried away red-faced, realizing that I seemed to have misread the moment. Reporter Bob Whereatt stopped by my cubicle to make me feel better: “That was not your best moment, kid!” Christ, I thought, Jesse thought I was trying to insult him! I dashed off a note of explanation and gave it to Jesse’s secretary. (the volatile Iron Range representative Tom Rukavina later gave me a ration of shit for “apologizing” – Rukavina gave the impression that I had weaselled out of what otherwise would have been a valorous zinger. I denied that I had apologized. I did not deny it, however, when Ventura sat with me for an interview some weeks later and said he thought my “apology” showed class.) The media portrayed the episode as a potential clue to the true nature (volatile! thin-skinned!) of the then-still-mysterious surprise governor. 

But in fact, Jesse was not actually throwing a tantrum over his singing voice. What we didn't realize was that, just moments before that press conference, Horner & Jesse & a couple of aides had been in Jesse's office rehashing the collapse-in-process of Horner's career in public life. I was told that Horner was talking like a broken man, saying the media coverage had been tearing his family apart, and that Jesse was full of sympathy and righteous anger. Clearly his retort reflected his anger at the media in general, not at some small-market pipsqueak who had the audacity to say he couldn't sing well. (In fact, Rolling Stone magazine’s later-published account of the inaugural weekend had its reporter making a similar crack at Jesse's expense, and depicted Jesse as laughing along like a good sport.)

Meanwhile I was allowing myself to enjoy the after-effects of my joke. A local TV station interviewed me. I later got an e-mail from a woman who had seen the segment asking me out on a date (“I’m thin,” she noted by way of enticement, and I intuited an eating disorder. Still, I dug it. Never had a journalism groupie before I met Jesse. In any case, I demurred, since I was dating someone at the time.). Someone told me my face flashed on CNN for an instant. People even expressed admiration to me that I had been courageous enough to ask "the tough questions.” (About singing?)

Soon enough Jesse had dished out utterances that were more outrageous (suggesting to the unemployed single mother in a protest on the Capitol steps that she should “get a job”) and more anti-press (growling that he ordered an SUV so that he could run over reporters, etc.) But I remain pleased with my part in that little story of the day, because it confirms that I was there – I was witness to a special era when we were astonished, still trying to come to grips with the fact that this cartoonlike man had won the right to hold this high and dignified office, miraculously sweeping aside the previous iron-clad assumptions only insiders and lawyers could hold high office, that only the two major parties run the show.