John Glenn: I would rather ‘wrestle a gorilla’ than ask for campaign money

NASA legend and former Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) would prefer picking a fight with a primate to raising funds for a campaign, lamenting that clamoring for cash “was the most onerous part of politics for me. I’d rather wrestle a gorilla right here on the floor than ask anybody for five bucks — make it a dollar.”

 The famed astronaut, 90, served for more than 20 years in the Senate before retiring from Congress in 1999.

Glenn, in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch, reflects on how these days, lawmakers find themselves under the media’s constantly probing, scandal-sniffing microscope: “If you’re going to run for high public office now, it’s just a given that you’ve got to open up every bit of your financial information and your medical records. And even if you have a pimple on your backside, that’s going to be public knowledge, and somebody’s going to make an issue of ‘Did he really have syphilis, or didn’t he have syphilis?’ or something like that. How do you get away from that?”

Ahem, for the record, ITK prefers to keep those STD stories to a minimum.

The orbit-traveling ex-senator also offers up another out-of-this-world revelation: He may be able to fly spaceships, but he’s still figuring out how to work his smartphone. He discloses to the paper, “I bought a book the other day — iPhones for Dummies. Boy, that’s me.”

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