Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Minnesota's governor-elect, holds his first news conference. He's asked how he will keep his promise to return to taxpayers a $4-billion surplus that has already been spent.

"Oh, sheesh," he mutters. . . .

To put the Minnesota "miracle" in perspective, Ventura is hardly the first political novice to be elected governor of a state. Nor is he truly a novice. His four years as a suburban mayor count for something, even if the city manager did the heavy lifting.

That's four more years in elected office than Claude R. Kirk Jr. had when Florida elected him in 1966. Or four more years than Jeb Bush.

Because it's the weird and unexpected that make news (and jokes for David Letterman and Jay Leno), Ventura's unconventional background and colorful persona are now probably more familiar to most people than the famous blandness of California's Gray Davis, who is merely the new governor of the nation's largest state.

That Ventura did physical work for a living and lacks a college degree does not necessarily mean he is unqualified. To the contrary, the professional fakery of pro wrestling could be considered superb on-the-job training for a politician.

Seriously, common sense and intellectual curiosity are not restricted to people with college degrees. Harry Truman didn't have one. Neither did Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman who became one of America's most admired philosophers.

Ventura's problem -- or should we say Minnesota's? -- is that, unlike Truman and Hoffer, he appears to be blissfully ignorant of every detail a competent governor needs to know.

As Florida survived Kirk, however, so will Minnesota endure Ventura, and some good may even come out of it. Providentially, the American system of government was designed with three branches.

It would be a serious mistake to treat Ventura's election only as the start of a running joke.

He made a virtue of turning down special interest contributions and running on only one-sixth as much money -- $500,000 -- as his opponents had. Other politicians are fools if they don't think that's why many voters chose him.

His victory was a primal scream from the electorate.

"The key to his appeal is aimed at people's anger at managed politics," said Harry Boyte, a senior fellow at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Political Affairs at the University of Minnesota, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times. "He aimed at the feeling that political advertising was condescending, that Democrats and Republicans were condescending to the people. "He is like us, and we are not as stupid as they think,' is the message the voters were sending, and not just to Minnesota."

It has to be more than coincidence that Minnesota, with a 59.5 turnout Tuesday, was the only state where as many as half of those eligible cared to vote. The national average was 36.1, lowest since 1942. Minnesota had same-day registration as well as Ventura.

Whatever the messages, they are muddled by the fact that Ventura was not the choice of a majority of Minnesotans who voted Tuesday, but of only 37 percent of them. The Republican, Norm Coleman, polled nearly as many, 35 percent. Attorney General Hubert H. Humphrey III, the Democrat, ran third with 28.

Minnesota has had governors who didn't win a majority of votes before, but none with so low a plurality. The Legislature, where there is no member of his Reform Party, will be tempted to try to marginalize him.

So another lesson is that there is a role for runoffs in general elections as well as in primaries. Minnesota has no runoff. Humphrey himself was nominated with only 38 percent in a four-man field in the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party's Sept. 16 primary, amid the lowest voting turnout in 50 years. As a result, Humphrey surely suffered from not having his party clearly behind him in the general election.

As I have written before, the runoff does not have to be held on a subsequent date, as Florida expensively and inconveniently requires. It can be simultaneous. All that's necessary is to let voters mark second choices on their ballots, and reconfigure the computers to count them.

John Thrasher, speaker-designate of the Florida House, says he intends to look at this. Thrasher had it in mind before Tuesday's election because of the dismal turnout in Florida's runoff primary. The need is clearer now that the Constitution has been revised to give minority parties equal access to the ballot. What happened in Minnesota can now happen here.

How might instant runoff have worked in Minnesota? Because no one had a majority, the top two, Ventura and Coleman, would have remained in the race, with Humphrey eliminated. The computers would then have counted the second-choice votes cast for Ventura or Coleman by people whose first choice had been Humphrey. One or the other would have emerged with a clear majority, unburdened by lingering doubts such as will dog Ventura.

If Humphrey's voters were as turned off to Coleman as Ventura's voters were to both of the establishment candidates, Ventura probably would have bagged most of Humphrey's second-choice votes.

In that event, Ventura would have had the mandate that any new governor needs. And the public would have the confidence of knowing that whether his election was good or bad, it was the decision of a majority rather than a minority to impose him on the state of Minnesota.