Jesse Ventura, a former boa-wearing fake wrestler who also somehow was elected governor of Minnesota, says that if he runs for president in 2016, he wants radio legend Howard Stern to be his running mate.
Ventura, a renowned conspiracy theorist who entertains the notion that the world is controlled by a council of seven genocidal people and believes 9/11 was an inside job, said that he has already talked to the 59-year-old Stern about the possibility.
“Well Howard and I, I floated it by him and he had some interest in it,” Ventura said in a appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ “eccentric” radio show last week.
Ventura, 62, went on to say that Stern “got that Howard twinkle in his eye” when he raised the possibility of a run and that he was going to “point blank” ask Stern for a yes or no answer when he appears on Stern’s radio show Wednesday.
“I’ll be out there on Wednesday and so Wednesday I’m going to point blank him and say, ‘Howard, I can’t do it without you,’ because there is certain things I need from Howard to make this successful,” Ventura said. “And one of the things is I despise raising the money — the bribing of the officials and all that. And if I had someone like Howard, how much money could Howard raise with his radio show and I wouldn’t even want to know about it.”
Asked by email to comment on the potential 2016 ticket, political guru Larry Sabato, of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said, “Haha. Now I’ve heard everything.”
“This ticket would truly be a choice, not an echo,” he added. “It’s the ultimate ‘None of the Above’ duo.”
Jones’ show was not the first time Ventura mentioned the possibility of a presidential run with Stern as his running mate. He raised the prospect of such a ticket as far back as September 2012. A Twitter account — @VenturaStern16 — even exists pushing for the political pairing, as do several different Facebook pages.
In September 2012, after Ventura first mentioned Stern as a possible running mate, Stern responded on his radio show, calling it “probably the most absurd thing” he’s ever heard. But he claimed he would consider it.
Though Ventura fashions himself a libertarian, he told The Daily Caller in a bizarre interview last year that Marxism may actually be the best political system.
“The Communism of Karl Marx would probably be actually the best for everybody as a whole,” he explained. “But what he didn’t figure into was human nature and that’s what corrupts it.”
Ventura also laid out to TheDC what it would take to get him to run for president in 2016.
“Here’s what it will take. I will run with no party. I will run as Jesse Ventura individual citizen. But it would require a grassroots move costing me and the campaign no money. No money,” he said. “A grassroots move of the people to get me ballot access between now and 2016 in all 50 states. They’ve got three years to do it. In all 50 states get me ballot access and there must be an outcry that I must have a guarantee ironclad that I can be in the debates. … If that’s met, I would probably run for president.”
Stern, whose $400 million contact with Sirius XM Radio ends in 2015, ran for governor of New York on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1994 before withdrawing from the race after a judge ruled he had to disclose his financial records.
