Government is supposed to be for the people, by the people.
But now that Ventura has traded in his gold lame wrestling shorts for a politician's pinstripe suit, he's decided he doesn't think so highly of the people's judgment after all. ''While it would be refreshing to give the absolute will of the people a chance to be heard on specific issues,'' he wrote this month in a letter to The Wall Street Journal, ''it often results in too many laws being proposed and too much confusion for voters on Election Day. Wrong on all counts. Ballots are not flooded with initiatives in the states that allow them, voters have no trouble passing judgment on complicated measures, and big-money interest groups that manage to get their pet bills on the ballot are routinely shot down on Election Day. The arguments against letting the voters occasionally decide an issue directly are not new, and they haven't improved with age. What most of them have in common is the belief that ordinary voters are dumber than ordinary legislators.