‘Neither Left nor Right, but a sane alternative to the duopoly’: Why Galloway’s urging Jesse Ventura to run for president

As the campaign to draft Jesse Ventura for an independent run at the US presidency gathers pace, George Galloway, who knows him well, runs a careful eye over the former wrestler turned Minneapolis mayor and Minnesota governor.

Full disclosure: Jesse Ventura is a friend of mine. I admire him greatly. I can nonetheless objectively assess the wisdom of the presidential run he is now contemplating. Spurned by the Green Party of the United States for its nomination, the big man is actively considering running on his own – a much better bet in my view. There is absolutely no need for him to tie himself to the ‘eco-socialist’ baggage of the US Greens and all their politically correct personal and identity politics paraphernalia.

As he put it himself in an interview last week, “If I were to get in this race, my message would be simple: we need an independent right now. Because if Biden gets elected or Trump gets re-elected, the polarisation is going to continue and it’s going to get worse.” 

There is more than the whiff of madness – and formaldehyde – emanating from the basement of Joe Biden, somewhere in Delaware. Leaving aside – in the era of #MeToo and heightened public outrage at the sexualised exploitation of children – the putative president’s predilection for touching women and young girls in public view, Biden’s cognitive decline is widely acknowledged to have been spectacularly steep.

Few days go by without his basement tapes revealing more starkly his inability to remember names or numbers, or even where he is. In a split-screen interview alongside his putative vice-presidential running mate Elizabeth Warren last week, the senator was captured rolling her eyes as the would-be-president mixed his millions with his billions before giving up in frustration.

More tellingly for me was when Biden welcomed the media to a community centre that was not the community centre they were actually in, or even one in the century they were currently in. Ah, the community centre he had welcomed them to was “the one in which [he] used to work.”

Now given Joe Biden was a US senator from 1973, when Bob Dylan was laying down the original ‘Basement Tapes,’ he could only have been working in a community centre during the Swinging Sixties. That’s the 1960s for younger readers.

Not knowing your millions from your billions can be forgiven in a politician – it seems remarkably common. But not knowing the 21st from the 20th century – and mid-century at that – might just be a harbinger of greater problems to come. And both of these things happened just last week. The week before and the week before that are beyond the scope of this work.

The madness of Donald Trump is beyond dispute, surely. Like a giant rogue elephant, he is blundering around trampling what remains of America’s reputation underfoot while the coronavirus he predicted would melt away with the first spring sunshine rages like a wildfire. US unemployment has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression. Even the heavily disguised (and late) official unemployment figures cite about 30 million Americans out of work. Professor Richard D Wolff puts the real number at in excess of 25 percent, or at about a third of the US labour force being out of work and on the breadline. 

Protests are underway in many cities in the United States, drawing in hundreds of thousands of under-reported protesters as well as un-uniformed federal officers in unmarked vehicles.

The incipient health care crisis in the US, in which perhaps 60 million Americans have no health insurance, has ballooned, along with the levels of unemployment. No job, no health cover is the rubric for too many.

And during all of this, President Trump has taken his country to the brink of war with Iran and Venezuela, and to the foothills of war with both Russia and China, trashing treaties and diplomatic norms with the abandon of the Roaring Twenties. The crash is coming.

As the sad old donkey squares up to the unbalanced rogue elephant in November, millions of voters could be on the look-out for a sane, decent alternative. One like Jesse Ventura, whose program of environmental New Deals and withdrawal from foreign wars is made more credible by his record of public service – and winning elections against the duopoly.

Having successfully done so twice myself, I am acutely aware of how hard it is to bust the machine. But also, that it CAN be done.

A veteran of the American War on Vietnam (the one that bone spurs precluded Donald Trump from fighting in) and a former US Navy Seal, Jesse Ventura is nobody’s idea of a soft touch. He fought both Democrats and Republicans to become the mayor of Minneapolis and again to become the governor of Minnesota. His former family home was on fire during the riots over the killing of George Floyd.

He is the classic strong, firm hand on the tiller – he was a champion all-in wrestler in WWE. He can calm the streets, he can reassure the troops. He can put Wall Street in its proper place and stand up for main street, because it’s where he came from and has always inhabited. He is a world away from Biden and Trump, yet easily envisaged as presidential – a currency much debased in the 21st century. Jesse Ventura is neither “left” nor “right” – another debased currency, in any case. He is a roadster, a Harley Davidson rider. Think ‘True Grit: the Remake’. Think Jesse Ventura. And remember, you read it here.

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