Jerry Springer sounds off

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Minnesota's soon to be ex-governor, Jesse Ventura, is negotiating with a major cable network to host his own television talk show. It would make him the latest politician to forsake public service for the public airwaves, just like the former mayor of Cincinnati, Jerry Springer, did.

The reigning king of daytime talk joined "Crossfire" hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala to discuss Ventura's entrance into the talk show arena. He also talked about the Democrats, why they lost, and the looming possibility of a war in Iraq.

CARLSON: I don't think there's any question that Jesse Ventura would be a better talk show host than a governor. That's not saying anything, of course. Do you think he could make it as a talk show host?

SPRINGER: Oh, I think he'll be great at it. First of all, he represents a point of view that just isn't around with talk shows. I mean, the political talk shows all tend to be one person speaking for the Democrats, one person speaking for the Republicans and there's no middle of the road.

So I think he kind of reflects what I call the "Nascar vote," those people that are outside traditional politics. He could be very good. He's very personable.

BEGALA: Of course, we watch Nascar for the wrecks, not for the races. And there would be a lot of wrecks, I suppose on his show. If he can go into your current profession, why don't you go back into his? Why don't you go run for governor of Minnesota or maybe right there in Illinois or Ohio? Why not go back into politics, Jerry?

SPRINGER: OK, I will.

CARLSON: Announced on "Crossfire" -- right here.

BEGALA: I'll manage your campaign.

SPRINGER: You've got a deal. I'll call you.

BEGALA: If these guys can move into your business, why don't you move into theirs?

SPRINGER: Oh well, sure. The problem with the transition is always credibility. I think you can certainly go from politics into entertainment, and a number of people have done that. That's certainly the direction I took. Going from entertainment back into politics, that may be a tougher hurdle because there's the credibility issue.

You get an image of whatever your show is and I think you've got to live with that. But I think he could make that transition. He went from wrestling to the governorship, and now he's going back to doing what I do for a living, wrestling.

CARLSON: Well, I think personally you have much more credibility than most Democrats. I think you ought to try it. Tell me about your party, which is kind of disintegrating. What do you think went wrong last week?

SPRINGER: Well, we caved in on the war and we also didn't have a strong message on the economy. The truth is, as much as I love the Democrats, we deserved to lose. We didn't offer any real substantive alternative to the American people and we were running against a very popular president.

Even if some of us don't like his particular message, he certainly was very clear about what it was and the Democrats weren't. We were all over the lot and we did cave in on the war in Iraq, which I think is unconscionable. The idea of being an opposition party is that you offer an alternative, and the truth is we didn't.

BEGALA: You know I do this show every night with a live audience and I travel a fair amount. And I get the sense -- this is not from polling data, which supports the war -- but I get the sense that support is about a half an inch thick and that there's a great current of unease about this war. Do you pick that up in your own work?

SPRINGER: Oh, absolutely. You know, right now it's a patriotic issue. You know we are a nation of sound bites. We get our news in sound bites, politicians talk in sound bites. So it's very easy to say Hussein is evil, which of course he is, let's go get him.

We're going to hunt him down, we're going to find him, we're going to get him. I mean, all this Texas talk. And we do that, and the result is that, yes, everyone's in favor of that. But when you're actually in a war and people are dying and we are recruiting in a sense by this war in Iraq. We are recruiting a generation of Islamic people that are going to hate America, just like young Palestinians are growing up to hate Israel. If we start putting an American government in the middle of the Middle East, if we start bombing in the middle of the Middle East, these kids are going to grow up and hate America and there are going to be suicide bombers all over the place.

Right now, we have a war against terrorism. That's what we should be focused on. When you get on an airplane or when you go to a stadium, you're not thinking of Saddam Hussein, you're thinking of Osama bin Laden. You're going, holy crap, I hope everyone's OK on this plane, I hope no one's going to do something stupid.

That's the threat to America. We ought to be focused on that and not getting half the world to hate us because we're going to be in the part of the world that doesn't understand our way of life anyway.

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