WASHINGTON — Across America, Jesse "The Body" Ventura is famous as the wrestler who became governor of Minnesota. Few outside their home states ever have heard of Angus King or Tim Penny. But for anyone who wants to gauge the forces shaping politics and the parties in this country, King and Penny are people to notice.
King is the governor of Maine, elected and re-elected as an independent and now finishing his second and final four-year term with a record of substantial policy success.
Penny is about to embark on the same course, as the Independence Party candidate to succeed Ventura, who is stepping down after one term as Minnesota’s governor.
Penny was in Washington last week, helping celebrate the 80th birthday of John Anderson, the third-party independent candidate for president in 1980. He has a good chance to win his Minnesota race this November and to provide, along with King, a working example of the potential of building a strong political coalition in the center of the spectrum — without being a celebrity like Ventura, more renowned for his extracurricular activities than for his leadership of the state.
Like King, Penny’s roots are in the Democratic Party. His mother, he says, was devoted to John Kennedy, and he served as a Democrat for six years in the state Senate and for 12 years (from a traditionally Republican district) in the House of Representatives. Increasingly at odds with the spending habits of his own party and uncomfortable with the growing partisanship of the House, Penny retired in 1994 at the age of 43 and moved back to his home town of Waseca, population 9,611.
When Ventura was elected in 1998, Penny became an informal adviser, helping the governor staff his administration with able people from both parties. And when Ventura announced his retirement last month, it did not take much to persuade Penny to enter the race.
A poll taken by the Minneapolis Star Tribune just before Penny’s formal announcement of his candidacy in late June showed him tied with both Republican nominee Tim Pawlenty, the majority leader of the state House of Representatives, and state Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe, the choice of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
The two major party candidates are expected to have more campaign funds, but Ventura was badly outspent and still defeated the sitting Democratic attorney general and the Republican mayor of St. Paul.
The difference, of course, is that Ventura is a character who easily attracts attention, while Penny has the reputation of being serious and conscientious, but not particularly colorful.
That’s where he resembles King, a former Senate staffer and alternative-energy entrepreneur. King became well known as a commentator on Maine’s public television network; since leaving the House, Penny has remained prominent in Minnesota through his affiliation with the Hubert Humphrey Institute, a public policy center at the University of Minnesota.
Both are articulate — and, though they barely know each other, both have figured out something important about the electorates of their states.
What Penny said in an interview last week was strikingly similar to what King had told me eight years ago as we rode in his car during the early stages of his successful race against a Democratic former governor and a future Republican senator.
Both men said they found their home-state residents ‘tired of partisan politics and feeling, in a sense, abandoned or excluded by the old parties — a reaction to the bruising fights in their state capitols.
Penny put it this way: "There are maybe 60 percent of the people who stubbornly refuse to call themselves Republicans or Democrats. … It is not a mushy middle. It embraces fiscal responsibility, that we cannot demand more (from government) than we are willing to pay for. They want innovation, not just old programs taking more money. They are socially tolerant. They can’t understand why every Democratic and Republican politician wants to make the election about abortion, when that issue was settled 25 years ago. … They are also for political reform — a fair election process and a reduction of money in politics. And they are sickened by negative ads, the scorched-earth, mutually assured destruction approach they’ve seen too often from Democrats and Republicans."
Penny will be a target of both parties, but his candidacy — like King’s — is more proof that third parties can be more than protest movements built around charismatic figures.
If he appears as plausible and persuasive in November as he does in July, he won’t have to borrow Ventura’s cape and tights to win.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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