Strange as it sounds, George W. Bush could learn a thing or two about education and government spending from Minnesota’s professional wrestler turned Governor, Jesse “The Governing Body” Ventura. After two years of pulling his punches, Mr. Ventura’s second two-year budget calls for a hefty $1 billion tax cut and holds spending to a 5% increase. He has also body-slammed the biggest myth of state spending: that more money equals better education. He calls the education bureaucracy a “black hole" that consumes 44% of the state's expenditures. "For them no amount of money would be enough," he laments.

The Governor has even challenged school districts that have sent groups of students to the state capitol on school days to lobby for more spending. He says its time for Education Minnesota, the behemoth union, created by a merger of the state’s two teachers unions, to stop “using kids as political pawns.” He also argues that educators should be reclassified as "essential state employees” and thereby lose their ability to legally strike.

This new approach has confounded the Governor’s political adversaries. The Democratic State Senate reflexively attacked him as heartless. He responded by saying he believes in giving taxpayers results for their hard-earned dollars. Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled House last week caved in to the teachers union and actually tripled the Governor’s proposed increase in state spending on education. It then lamely promised to stay within Governor Ventura’s spending caps by finding cuts in other programs at some later time. We’ve heard that before.

Mr. Ventura’s come a long way from his 1998 campaign, when he picked a 64-year-old teacher to be his Lieutenant Governor. He railed against special interests on the campaign trail, but never included the teachers union among his targets - until now.

What Governor Ventura has come to learn is that educators, while sincere, are among the most change-resistant workers on the planet. Minnesota’s universities, for example, are seeking a 10% annual increase in their budgets without any sense that they must adapt to a changing economy. That kind of thinking wouldn’t fly in the private sector.

Mr. Ventura’s fiscal conservatism has won him respect from old foes. Jason Lewis, a popular conservative talk-show host who worked with Mr. Ventura in radio, has been a frequent critic of his “liberal-tarian” tenure in office. But he says his new budget now positions Mr. Ventura perfectly with his blue-collar base and has made the two major parties look like stodgy de-fenders of the status quo. “If war is the health of the state,” says Mr. Lewis, “then blind spending on schools can’t be far behind.” Mr. Ventura’s new political gyroscope makes it more likely that if Mr. Lewis runs for office next year, it won’t be for Governor but instead against the state’s hyper-liberal Senator Paul Wellstone.

President Bush might consider injecting a little more of Governor Ventura’s aggressiveness into his own education proposal. He has already largely abandoned its trace elements of school choice while keeping his plan to hike federal spending on education by 7%, tying it to comprehensive required testing of students in math, reading and science.

Tests in principle are fine by us and polls show that Republicans have obliterated the advantage that Democrats had built up among voters on education issues. Indeed, sound bites calling for abolishing the federal Education Department were often misunderstood as opposition to education in general. But that’s no reason to support large increases in federal aid to education coupled with modest accountability measures and an abandonment of school choice.

When George W. Bush said on the campaign trail that “Education is to the states what national defense is to the federal government,” the implication was that each should stick to its priorities. Governor Ventura is doing his part to hold the education bureaucracy accountable. Here’s hoping there’s a tag-team member in President Bush.