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Our View: Getting elected easy, doing the job is hard

We have mentioned before the many similarities between the election of Donald J. Trump as president and Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota.

Both cases are lessons, we feel, in the idea that getting elected may be the easy part. The tough part is doing the job.

Both candidates were outspoken, not politically correct in the slightest, men who said what other people wanted to say if they thought they could get away with it. They appealed to a different demographic than the typical candidate, mobilizing people who may not have voted before and drawing other voters who were tired of the same old stuff from both parties.

So they won their elections, with less than a plurality of the popular vote. Ventura won a three-way race with 37 percent of the vote. Trump got his 306 electoral votes but trailed in the popular vote.

Once they got in office, the similarity seems to end. Ventura, well aware that he was heading into strange and unusual territory, surrounded himself with competent able advisors and key staff, and he listened to them, at least for the first couple of years.

With Trump, we sense he has the attitude he knows what he’s doing and he’s going to do it his way. He is flouting tradition, flouting the rules, chafing at the constitutional limits placed upon him and expecting everyone else to get used to him.

This may not be such a bad thing. Washington, after all, badly needs a shaking up. But we hope a new normalcy will develop soon.

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