Uneasy Memories : Real Issues of ‘88: Voter Fear, Hope

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. —  Sitting in his warehouse office on warm spring days, Neal Bennett leans back in his chair, dreams again of the smell of neat’s-foot oil on a fresh baseball glove and talks nostalgically of summers past when he was an executive in the minor leagues.

Then his mind snaps forward to his present life and--most especially--the life ahead for his son. Today, after two terrifying bouts of unemployment, he still misses working in baseball, but he knows he’s lucky to have any job at all.

“The economy here has gotten a lot better in the last six years,” he says, but “it’s like when you talk to your parents about the way things were in the Depression.” Just as the older generation cannot forget its hard times, “you’re going to remember,” he says. “In the late ‘70s, early ‘80s . . . you may have been doing your job, but the rug got pulled out from under you.

‘Could Happen Again’

“So you remember: it happened once, it could happen again.”

And just as it did a half-century ago for Americans who suffered through the Great Depression, the memory of hard times that disrupted his life now shapes Bennett’s attitude toward politics--especially presidential politics.

Optimism and anxiety: In a campaign that so far lacks powerful issues that seize voters’ imaginations, the polar tugs of hope and fear on the electorate have assumed increasing importance. In this quintessential Northeastern industrial town--where voters will cast primary ballots Tuesday and where Democrats must win in November if they are to recapture the White House--people have only just begun to determine their attitudes toward candidates.

But in interviews over the last two months, about two dozen Wilkes-Barre residents revealed attitudes that may count far more than issues in determining their votes--attitudes about the future, formed and refined through the experiences of the past.

In Wilkes-Barre, the past is coal. It left a legacy of black waste that still dominates the landscape and of a strong sense of union solidarity that influences the majority who do not belong to unions almost as much as the minority who still do.

The past also includes a disastrous flood in 1972, which forced 80,000 people to flee, destroyed much of the city and made Wilkes-Barre a laboratory to test the federal government’s ability to rebuild blighted urban areas. In the years that followed, the city got “a tremendous amount of federal aid, perhaps . . . even a disproportionate amount of federal aid,” which the community has now only begun to learn how to do without, said Lee Namey, Wilkes-Barre’s young new mayor.

Those experiences have left Wilkes-Barre voters--overwhelmingly white, Catholic and ethnic Italian, Irish and Eastern European--unsympathetic both toward Republican calls for less government and toward Democrats associated with cultural liberalism, non-traditional life styles and pacifism. And the past has made voters instinctively uneasy about the future.

George Bush, the all-but-certain Republican nominee, suffers from the general wariness. But the surviving Democratic candidates may have their own trouble capitalizing on it.

Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, emphasizing his managerial experience and the health of the economy in his home state, is trying to reassure voters that he can guide the nation to a more secure prosperity. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, by contrast, denouncing “economic violence,” hopes to focus voters’ anxieties into a sense of grievance against the established order.

In Wilkes-Barre, each message appeals to some but neither message has yet proved effective across the full spectrum of voters’ hopes and apprehensions.

Unrelenting Optimist

Paul Yurchak, 34, is an unrelenting optimist. A former computer salesman, he is now a manager at the Donnelly Directory Co.--one of a spate of independent yellow pages directory advertising companies that have sprung up in the aftermath of telephone deregulation.

“I just recently finished building a new home,” he says, and “I got an 8.75% fixed (rate mortgage), so I’m as happy as I can be.”

Candace Mamary is not so sure. Hers is a voice of concern, and her concern, like Neal Bennett’s, centers on the prospects for the next generation.

As a social worker and counselor, she says: “I walk into schools, and I ask: ‘How many of you come from single-parent families?’ and 75 kids raise their hands, or I ask: ‘How many of you go home to empty houses?’ and 65 kids raise their hands. I worry about the future of the family.”

Patty Shinko, 29 and married since she was 19, stays at home in the house where her husband grew up and takes care of her two children and her sister’s toddler. A few years ago, she nearly had to move as her husband, an ironworker, began to despair of being able to find work around his hometown. Now, by contrast, “this year is the best it’s been.”

Having ridden the economic roller-coaster down and then back up, she says: “I don’t know where things go now.”

For his part Bennett, now approaching 50 and a buyer for a wholesale grocery co-op, examines candidates through a lens ground by memories of unemployment and tinted with anxiety for the future of himself, his neighbors and his son.

“My parents were always saying they had it better than their parents, and they hoped we would have it better than they did, which we did,” he says. His father’s father “had to go to work in the coal mines when he was 9 because his father was killed in a cave-in . . . that’s how much things have changed. It’s two generations.”

But as for the next generation, “They say the American dream is owning a house, but where are young people going to get a down payment? When you look at the numbers, the numbers are scary.”

Twenty-three-year-old Colleen Hannigan is similarly unsure. Her husband’s wages from a paint store plus hers from a two-day-a-week job as a dental assistant just barely meet the costs of maintaining a small apartment and caring for 17-month-old Ryan Patrick.

Times are tough, she says, but her parents had it harder.

Blames Imports

And William Roughsedge, 59, who last year lost his job with a company that makes industrial thread, blames imports for his layoff. He expresses worries about the future of the economy but bridles when his wife, Catherine, suggests the country is in trouble.

“We still live in the best country in the world, we live better than others,” he says.

This combination of attitudes prevalent in Wilkes-Barre has made its voters particularly unpredictable.

Eight years ago, many voted for Ronald Reagan. “I was a Reagan man because of defense,” says William Roughsedge. Voters who backed Reagan commonly said they thought President Jimmy Carter had let the country get pushed around too much.

Northeastern Pennsylvania, like other predominantly working-class ethnic areas around the country, is unabashedly patriotic. Through much of February, the lighted sign outside an area car dealership flashed a message exhorting: “Bring Back Our POWs/MIAs Lt. Rupinski, Maj. Conlon, Col. Wolfkiel.”

“Most of the people, they think it’s almost un-American to go against defense spending,” said Sam Bianco, head of the regional Central Labor Council, who long ago despaired of persuading his rank and file to vote against Reagan.

But today that issue has dissipated, and no other has arisen to replace it.

Drugs, which dominated the rhetoric in the past week’s New York primary, come up as a concern here. But the crime rate in this area is so low that some residents not only leave their front doors unlocked but park their cars with the keys in the ignition. Cocaine and heroin are distant, big-city problems.

Trade is a nagging annoyance in an area where local jobs, particularly in the garment and shoe industries, have been devastated by imports. But the decline of those industries is an old story. Well before there was competition from Korea, the garment industry had been fleeing south.

By now, many voters have grown “accustomed to the notion that these industries are not in their future,” said John Plabani, an aide to Rep. William H. Gray III (D-Pa.) and consultant to Democratic candidates in the state.

And while the deficit and the national debt routinely top the lists of concerns expressed by voters to pollsters, few people seem to find these issues steering them toward one political candidate or another.

“I don’t think anyone has any clear-cut answers” on the deficit, said optimist Yurchak. “Who knows, who really knows what to do about it?”

Added Roughsedge: “I don’t like the idea of our being a debtor nation, but what does that really mean to me?”

In the past, the domestic-policy message that best appealed to voters here consisted of one word: “jobs,” said Democratic Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski, who two years ago became the first person in a decade to win reelection as the area’s congressman.

But now the double-digit unemployment rates that were common here during much of the last generation have subsided to a rate only slightly higher than the 5.6% national average. During the bad times, the lack of good jobs forced thousands of young people to leave the region, disrupting the close family ties that area residents pride themselves on. That too has begun to change for the better as the steady outward expansion of the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas begins to reach Wilkes-Barre.

Lack of Issues

The lack of motivating issues has been a constant factor nationwide so far during this election year, according to I. A. Lewis, director of the Los Angeles Times Poll. And in the absence of issues, voters’ conflicting feelings about the future--whether the country is “on the right track or heading in the wrong direction,” as several pollsters phrase the question--may be the strongest determinant of how people will vote.

Recent polls by several organizations have shown 55% to 60% of voters feeling the country is off course, with women particularly expressing a feeling that “is not so much pessimism as anxiety,” said pollster Burns Roper.

Anxiety is no stranger to Wilkes-Barre, and that will do no good for Bush, the candidate promising to continue the policies of the present.

But because many Wilkes-Barre voters suggested that the concerns they have are beyond the ability of any President to answer, voter anxieties are not necessarily a clear ticket for Democrats. In Wilkes-Barre and surrounding Luzerne County, the problems of the national Democratic Party can be seen in sharp relief.

Once, nearly all these people would have been loyally, predictably, Democrats. Fifty-nine-year-old Jackie Istvan, for example, laughingly says of her grandmother that she “would sprinkle the house with holy water” if a guest came by who was not both a Democrat and Catholic.

Now, she says, shaking her head, she has relatives who vote Republican. “I’m voting my pocketbook,” they tell her.

People still vote religiously here--Luzerne County, which includes Wilkes-Barre, routinely registers voter turnouts well over 60%, in part because the average age of the population here is higher than almost any region outside Florida--but voters no longer are true to their old-time creed.

Despite a Democratic registration edge of 3 to 2 over Republicans countywide, Ronald Reagan carried the county in both of the last two elections. Even within the city of Wilkes-Barre, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 and hold the mayor’s office and all seven seats on the City Council, Reagan ran almost even with Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale.

Compete for Loyalty

This time around, Republicans must try to hold the loyalty Reagan won, while Democrats will try to win it back.

The reason goes beyond Pennsylvania itself, which with its 25 electoral votes is a major prize standing alone--the fourth-largest state and one that has sided with the winner 10 times in the last 12 elections.

Even more important, what a candidate must do to win this state is what he must do to win nationally--find a way to appeal both to yuppies in the Philadelphia suburbs and ethnic blue-collar workers such as those in Wilkes-Barre.

“The person who can bridge that gap wins the state, and probably wins nationally too,” said Plabani.

If the gap is not bridged, however, Kanjorski offers a gloomy prediction. “If the Democrats can’t carry that district,” the congressman said, “they can’t carry the country.”

This year’s Republican ticket, by contrast, is trying to appeal to the most optimistic voters, the entrepreneurial spirits who, according to a major survey of the electorate that the Gallup Organization performed last year for Times-Mirror Co., have become the GOP’s most consistent and loyal followers.

The central themes of Ronald Reagan’s presidency--appeals to a rebirth of national pride, to “Morning in America”--were built around the optimistic espousal of the creed of individual competition, hard work and success. It is a creed that has worked well for Paul Yurchak, the computer salesman-turned-office-manager, the last eight years. When he looks out the back window of his new house, he sees 30 new single-family homes built in his neighborhood in the last year, a sure sign, he says, that the creed is working for others as well.

To Yurchak’s way of thinking, adversity is just a challenge to be overcome, marketplace competition is the ultimate test, and failure is a sign of weakness. If American companies are losing ground to foreign competition, “their reaction time is just too slow,” he says. “I myself buy the best product,” regardless of its origin.

“I’m positive. I feel good about the country,” he says. “I’m a supporter of Reagan. I like what he’s done.”

For most of his neighbors, however, the competition for political loyalty appears wide open as they cast about for solutions to the problems they see ahead. Much of their anxiety appears to center on children--the difficulties of rearing them in a society with rapidly changing values and the prospects for prosperity as they grow up.

Colleen Hannigan, the part-time dental assistant with the 17-month-old baby, similarly would like to see her baby son grow up to go to college. To help him get there, she would like her husband to go back to school to get a better job. She would like to go back to school herself so that she could move up to become a dental hygienist. For now, however, those dreams must be deferred.

“Two people have to work these days to make a living,” she says. “The next 10 years are going to be tougher. The cost of living keeps going up.”

On the other hand, she reflects, “my parents had it harder when they were growing up. They didn’t have the money for anything. My father lied about his age to get a job in the mines.”

‘Service Country’

And the laid-off William Roughsedge, only a few minutes after objecting to his wife’s worries about the future, voices his own concerns: “Slowly this country, if we don’t watch it, is turning into a service country--McDonald’s,” he says. “Who can live on all these minimum-wage jobs? That’s what a lot of these new jobs are.”

“These are crazy times for families in this country,” says social worker Mamary. “That may sound funny, I went to school in the ‘60s--the war, the demonstrations, the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations--those were kind of crazy times, but I think these are worse, we knew right from wrong then, things were clearer.”

Today, by contrast, “there aren’t any heroes anymore. My gosh, that sounds corny, but who are the heroes?”