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                ╘╓                                                        ╚NATION, Page 16

COVER STORIES

Voters Are Mad as Hell


Angry about the economy and worried about the future, middle-
class Americans warn politicians that they had better get serious
-- and in a hurry

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Jon D.
Hull/Manchester and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh


    What would George Bush hear if he took along a spiral
notebook and two Secret Service agents and began a series of
quiet visits, without the press, to communities like East
Lansing, Mich., and Kansas City, Mo., and Geneva, N.Y., and
Anaheim, Calif.? He could stay up late drinking coffee with a
family or two and listening to their problems, and then go to
sleep on the foldout sofa in the living room.

    He might go to Cary, N.C., to talk to Michael and Julie
Harlow. "We're taxed to death," Michael Harlow would tell Bush.
Michael, 30, and his wife Julie, together earn $20,000 to
$25,000 a year, pay rent on a two-bedroom apartment because they
cannot afford to buy a house, and worry what the future holds
for their two-month-old daughter Grace.

    "I hate to admit it, because I am a Republican," says
Michael Harlow, who served eight years in the Air Force and now
works the evening shift at the front desk of a hotel. "But it
appears that Bush, like Reagan before him, favors the wealthy,
tolerates the poor and has forgotten the largest group in the
middle." Julie Harlow, 33, has a degree in business
administration and works part time managing a local gift store.
"Sometimes I think the American Dream, at least for the middle
class," she says, "is about dead."

    The Harlows are disgusted with the "childish bickering" of
the President and Congress. "All the politicians can agree to
is to disagree," says Michael. "When they do legislate
something, it's about something ridiculous, like flag burning.
Come on!" Julie Harlow speaks for millions: "They
[politicians] are a bunch of bozos."

    House Republican whip Newt Gingrich heard the political
noise emanating from New Hampshire and said it sounded like "a
primal scream."

    The scream, if primal, was perfectly articulate. The New
Hampshire primary amounted to a cry of anger, disgust and pain
that was above everything else a warning to George Bush, a kind
of political death threat. New Hampshire's Republicans gave only
53% of their vote to the incumbent President -- a stroke of lese
majeste that distantly recalled the 50% that New Hampshire
Democrats gave Lyndon Johnson in 1968, when Eugene McCarthy took
42% and helped force L.B.J. to withdraw.

    Republicans lavished 37% on the upstart Pat Buchanan, an
intensely focused right-wing commentator and old Nixon-Reagan
speechwriter who uses ideas like ax handles. Those votes were
less an expression of faith in Buchanan than an angry gesture
directed at Bush, at his broken promises ("Read my lips: no new
taxes") and at what many saw as his almost bizarre disconnection
from the realities of American life, especially life in New
Hampshire, which has been in an economic slump since 1989. At
the end of the primary campaign, Bush showed up at a "town
meeting" in Goffstown in the company of Arnold Schwarzenegger,
who presumably was brought along to impress the crowds in a way
that the President of the U.S. might not. It was not a shrewd
piece of media work: Schwarzenegger the Terminator, an action
figure out of Hollywood, proclaimed fantasy at a moment when
voters had gathered to look for something real -- a little
something in the way of presidential leadership. The
resplendently overmuscled image of Arnold blinded the audience
to the image of the Leader of the Free World. In the real
world, at a polling station in Manchester, a graphic artist
named Doug Rasmun explained his vote for Buchanan: "As a
Republican, I think we have to scare some sense into Bush before
it's too late."

    For New Hampshire's Democrats, the choice was more
complicated, and the results in a way more interesting. Former
California Governor Jerry Brown, usually enveloped in an aura
of indignation, did not profit from the prevailing anger. A
different contrarian principle worked in favor of Paul Tsongas.
The former Massachusetts Senator, survivor of lymphoma, preacher
of no-nonsense, progrowth, probusiness ("You can't have
employment and despise employers -- no goose, no golden eggs"),
came away with 33% of the vote. His importance was symbolic as
well as substantive: Tsongas possesses a power of
glamourlessness, a nerdy, basset-hound anti-image that gives
hope to some voters who despair of American politics as glib,
empty, pointless -- all sound bites and video bursts. Tsongas'
astringent message was that Santa Claus in whatever extravagant
forms (Ronald Reagan or the Great Society) is not coming back,
and the nation can't afford any more toys. Tsongas succeeded,
for the moment, by being virtually everything that Reagan was
not.

    Bill Clinton had to contend not only with the claim of his
marital faithlessness and questions about the way he handled his
draft status in 1969, but also with an impression of being a bit
too facile -- "Slick Willie," as some call him in Arkansas. The
attention to his personal life and the forbearance with which he
bore the rude, intrusive process diminished the Slick Willie
problem. Clinton, calling himself "the Comeback Kid," got a
handsome 25% of the vote for second place.

    The Atmosphere of Pain

    On one level, the message from New Hampshire seemed
contradictory. Buchanan mocked Bush for raising taxes, while
Tsongas ridiculed his opponents for promising to cut
middle-class taxes -- an indulgence, Tsongas thought. But both
Buchanan and Tsongas attracted voters for similar reasons. Among
those deeply troubled over the nation's condition and desperate
for a change, Buchanan and Tsongas represented the most
appealing antidotes to the political paralysis in Washington.
They had appealing intensity, and they were, in their two
strange ways, both fresh characters in a process Americans have
come to believe is hopelessly phony. "When you're bleeding,"
says University of New Hampshire political scientist Robert
Craig, "of course you are sick of the status quo. There is a
broad undercurrent epitomized by two-income families who realize
they are not going to make it. People are really afraid. If they
miss just one paycheck, they will lose the home and the car.
It's that close."

    The New Hampshire results suggested an emerging
seriousness and impatience in American voters, a sense that they
are groping into difficult political and moral territory, often
well in advance of both the politicians and media. The usual
American political apparatus seemed to be malfunctioning,
defective -- incapable of bringing along plausible leaders,
Presidents, as it once did. The party of Franklin Roosevelt,
Harry Truman and John Kennedy was fielding another B-team. So
it seemed to many voters, who also thought that the Republicans
had a President -- and Vice President -- of unusual
weightlessness.

    New Hampshire confirmed that the '90s are different from
the '80s, very different: in mood and means, in manners and
moralities. The '80s had more money, of course, or at least
overleveraged illusions of money.

    The 1990s sometimes look like the '80s turned inside out,
as if the nation had been wearing a reversible raincoat. The
gaudy, triumphal colors flashed during the Reagan years are
suspect now. Or else they are remembered somewhat wistfully. The
full national regalia was last worn when the troops came home
from Desert Storm, which seems a while ago.

    The recession has left the great American middle class
feeling frayed and sobered and vulnerable. Fear and anger are
eating like acids at the electorate. A shadowed mood has been
playing across the country. Stories of foreclosures and lost
jobs have woven themselves into a virtual folklore. Many who
have been accustomed to the upholstered assumptions of the
American Dream have discovered what looks like an abyss,
something the middle class has not seen before. Looking down
gives them terrible vertigo. It scares them, and makes them want
to attack the politicians they think have led them to this
place.

    Some of the anguish no doubt amounts to self-pity among
some of the world's more spoiled citizens, now forced to clean
up their debts, live within their means and build an economy
that makes competitive sense in a world that has spectacularly
changed. But the pain is real, and so is the fear of pain, even
what is becoming a sort of national atmosphere of pain. As the
President discovered, all that emotion compresses into an anger
that has sharp political consequences.

    The voters of New Hampshire play an odd role in the
American political drama. Holding the first primary, the tiny
state with relatively few minorities exercises a quaint,
disproportionate fascination for the media and the rest of the
country. The tryout in New Hampshire focuses the process and
tests the scripts. New Hampshire voters relish their role as a
sort of Council of the Wise. They choose their candidates with
the care that others reserve for selecting a heart surgeon.

    The rest of the U.S. is not New Hampshire. In Georgia, for
example, which holds its primary next week, the unemployment
rate (4%) is about half that of New Hampshire. Still, many of
the same unhappy themes run deep through states across the
country. The American electorate is in a volatile mood,
impatient with incumbents, with political emptiness and with a
feeling of unfamiliar, inexplicable embarrassment before the
world, a discomfort focused lately by Japanese remarks about
America's work habits.

    Shrinking Middle

    For months, political experts have agreed that the vast
and much troubled American middle class will be the
battleground of the 1992 election.

    What exactly is the middle class? And why is it so angry
and confused now?

    In political calculus, the middle class works out to be
about 63% of the American population, meaning those families of
four earning between $18,500 and $74,300.

    When Americans are asked to put themselves into class
categories, a huge 86% consider themselves either middle class
or working class. That range accommodates enormous differences
of attitude. The vice president of a small-town bank and a
master plumber may have roughly the same income, but they are
likely to look at the world differently. Further, middle-class
attitudes and circumstances differ considerably between those
over, say, 45 years of age, who may own a home, have a pension,
health insurance and other stabilizing structures, and those who
are younger, who may make the income but have found it
impossible to buy a house. Those younger middle-class people may
be much more vulnerable and volatile than their middle-class
elders.

    However, when the top layer of the middle classes --
professionals, senior managers, proprietors whose businesses
have not been damaged by the current hard times -- is skimmed
off, a certain unity appears. That top stratum is relatively
small. But even some members of that favored group share a
strong bond of attitude with those a step or two down: they
share a feeling of loss. A recent TIME/CNN survey showed that
88% think it is more difficult, compared with a few years ago,
"for the average middle-class American to make ends meet."

    They are right. Median family income in the U.S. has held
steady over the past 20 years only because so many spouses have
taken jobs and gone to work. Even with those extra incomes, the
size of the middle class has been shrinking. Before the onset
of the recession in 1990, according to a survey by Timothy
Smeeding of Syracuse University and Greg Duncan of the
University of Michigan, "the middle class has decreased from
about three-quarters of the population to about two-thirds."
Some of the shrinkage resulted from upward mobility -- people
earned their way into upper brackets. But most of the change has
been downward.

    Middle-class identity, especially in America, is much
deeper and more complex than objective statistics. The American
Revolution was a middle-class struggle involving taxes and
property rights. The middle class is essentially America itself,
its soul, its promise, its culture and myth. It is in the middle
class that the nation locates its center of gravity, its values,
its work force, its soldiers, its leaders and above all its
voters. American democracy means middle-class democracy. The
drama of the U.S. in its progress from the stock-market crash
of 1929, through the Great Depression, its victory in World War
II and its prosperous domination of the postwar years might be
seen as a vast morality play culminating in the apotheosis of
the American middle class and its values. But no apotheosis can
last forever.

    America's powerful engine was the implicit contract that
the nation made with its middle classes set loose to work upon
a bounteous continent. When the economy doesn't live up to the
contract, when the mobility is downward, when failure, the
darkest American sin, sets in, the middle class becomes
confused, feels betrayed. It turns upon its leaders and itself.

    Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has
wondered aloud why Americans are so deeply gloomy about the
current recession, even though the objective statistics
(unemployment, inflation) are less horrendous now than in, say,
1982. The answer is that Americans, above all the middle class,
have fallen into a sort of double-bottomed gloom.

    Americans always feel somewhat betrayed by recession or
depression, but they are usually sustained through cyclical ups
and downs by an overriding sense of America as an ascendant
proposition -- the American exceptionalism. That sense of unique
American virtue and the American place in the scheme of things
has grown deeply confused in the rapid evolution of a much
changed world. Since the end of World War II, Americans have
known themselves as the giant of the Free World, the dominant
economic power and the Force of Good in counterweight to the
Force of Evil in the Soviet Union. Americans are now trying to
assimilate, morally, emotionally, the dissolution of the Soviet
Union. If it is such a splendid event in the history of the
world, why are Americans obscurely depressed by it? In part
because it makes them ask, Who are we now? What is our purpose
in the world? Why are we exceptional?

    In the new world, America is economically challenged by
Japan and Germany, the powers it defeated in war.

    At the same time, massive infusions of new immigrant genes
confuse and disconcert a people who must think of themselves as
a tribe that has been formed by an idea. In an America so
bruised in its sense of identity, a politician like Patrick
Buchanan can summon up a powerful visceral response with the old
nativist phrase "America First."

    Finally, the baby-boom generation always exaggerates the
moods of America -- skewing a national tendency in the direction
of its own concerns, whether sex, drugs, music in the '60s or
the traumas of middle age now. The boomers, who have just
arrived in the neighborhood of mid-life crisis, are getting a
taste of the disillusion and hopelessness that naturally arrive
when people think their best years are behind them. The boomer
effect may endow the recession with more undercurrent menace and
even apocalypse than are absolutely necessary.

    But the conviction runs deep that Americans' lives are
getting worse and worse, and will never get better again -- that
the American Dream is over. And politics is psychology with
access to a microphone. At the end of the '70s, Americans
recoiled from Jimmy Carter's malaise. That had a passive,
flinching, disconsolate quality, and no clear remedy. The
obvious victim of that irritating little foreign word malaise
was finally Jimmy Carter himself. Today's disaffection is an
active, even aggressive disgust, and while the mood may pass as
the economy improves, its clearest target for the moment is
George Herbert Walker Bush.