COLUMN ONE : Crisis of Confidence Grips U.S. : Americans fear national decline, eroding opportunities--and doubt politicians’ ability to chart a road back. Fontana offers a good listening post for middle-class concerns.

Listen to these voices from a winter of discontent in America.

A 30-year-old graphics illustrator: “We were planning on having another child, but with what’s going on in the economy, I’m not sure we can because if something did go wrong with my job, we’d be in bigger trouble.”

A 59-year-old truck stop operator: “Even if you get a 5% raise, it disappears before you get it in your paycheck. There’s no way someone on the bottom can get ahead.”

A 32-year-old aerospace worker: “I pity my kids. By the time they’re going to be able to buy a house, it’s going to be so far out of reach they’re going to have to work three jobs just to make ends meet.”

Are Americans being too gloomy? Looking at their charts and graphs, economists insist this recession isn’t as deep as its predecessors. Pointing to the victory in the Persian Gulf War and the collapse of communism, President Bush says the United States is “once again, the respected leader of the entire world.”

And yet the nation is mired in an extraordinary funk--the deepest since the crisis of confidence that engulfed Jimmy Carter’s presidency and bequeathed to the American political lexicon a new description of popular discontent: malaise.

Now the ghost of malaise is stalking George Bush.

As the presidential campaign of 1992 commences, polls show that the lingering economic recession is sharpening fears about the nation’s future that have been gathering for 20 years. During the 1950s and 1960s, Americans consistently expressed confidence that life in the country would continue to improve with time.

Today, many of us are not so sure.

In one recent poll, over three-fifths of those surveyed said the United States is “in a state of decline.” In another survey, over three-fourths said the United States has been surpassed economically by Japan.

Because Americans tend to envision the distant future through the lens of the immediate present, the recession may be inflating those numbers, opinion analysts say. But fears of national decline and constricting opportunities appeared in polls even before the economy went south in 1990. And these anxieties draw their caustic strength from concerns that run deeper than the business cycle.

In country corner stores and downtown diners, in inner cities and leafy suburbs, people fret about the quality of the schools, the well-being of the family, the state of relations between whites and minorities, the loss of high-paying jobs to foreign competitors, the cost of health care and housing, the imprisoning spread of crime, the stain of millions of children living in poverty and the inability of the nation’s leaders--obsessed with reelection and raising money--to cope with any of these dilemmas.

At least since the United States climbed out of the Depression, the unspoken promise of American life has been that children will live better than their parents. But now, with these problems accumulating like unpaid bills, many wonder whether the escalator of upward mobility still runs. Majorities of Americans now routinely tell pollsters they do not expect the next generation to live as well as we do today.

“Normally, it’s taken for granted it’s going to be better for the next generation than it was for us,” says Frederic Hook, a 29-year-old electronics engineer from Fontana, who has just bought his first home with his wife. “But that probably stopped being true in the 1960s. Now, I think it’s just going to be tougher.”

To assess Americans’ attitudes toward their current situations, and their expectations for the future, Times reporters are visiting seven communities around the country, talking with people about the most basic aspects of life in the nation--the issues they want to hear addressed by the men who would be President in 1992.

These conversations echo with the anxieties of an uneasy society, fearful of fundamental economic and even moral decline and unsure whether their political leaders have the capacity to chart and clear a road back.

Tuesday night, President Bush will stand in the well of the House of Representatives and peer out from the summit of government to assess the state of the union. But the state of the union is also measured block by block, house by house, in the way 250 million Americans live their daily lives. And on many of those streets, there is a chilly sense of foreboding about what the future holds in the nation their children will inherit.

We begin nearby, examining worries about jobs and income in Fontana, a city of 87,535 located about one hour east of Los Angeles in San Bernardino County. As a metropolis, Fontana is modest. But Fontana is a useful place to plumb American attitudes toward the economic future because, to an unusual degree, it has been shaped and reshaped by the waves of economic change that have remade American life through this century.

Fontana was born just before World War I as an agricultural oasis carved out by a San Bernardino contractor to woo citrus growers and chicken ranchers at a time when more people lived in the country than the city. It boomed through the zenith of American manufacturing supremacy from the 1940s into the 1970s as a steel town willed into life by Henry J. Kaiser.

And even after the giant Kaiser Steel Corp. mill was shuttered in 1983--the victim of bad management and sharp foreign competition--Fontana has found a third life, providing affordable housing for young commuters following the great national diaspora to the suburbs.

With a reputation for a rowdy and sometimes intolerant past (Fontana was the birthplace of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang and has suffered through occasional outbursts by the Ku Klux Klan), this is today very much a working- and middle-class community, divided between older longtime residents and young families who have moved from Los Angeles and Orange County in search of affordable homes. (According to the 1990 Census, the median housing value here is $134,600, 40% lower than in Los Angeles County.) It is a miniature of the nation in its vivid racial diversity, with whites, blacks (9% of the population), Latinos (more than 36%) and Asians (5%) all often living on the same street.

Here, as in most parts of the country, the recession has struck unevenly. Brad Brown, 30, a warehouseman, has been out of work six months and sees no improvement in his prospects ahead. Even after 10 months on the job at a loading dock, Kevin Johnson, 37, still has not been able to convert his part-time position, which does not provide health benefits, into full-time work.

“The money is tight,” he says, leaning against a car outside the building where he rents an apartment with his family. “And it’s bad because I got two boys in the house and a wife, and we ain’t got any (health) insurance. If something was to happen now, we’d have to depend on God.”

For many others--a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, a restaurant manager, a computer products salesman--the economic slowdown is more a lurking threat than an imminent danger. “I’m not feeling it too bad,” says Glen Stott, a 47-year-old civil engineer, “but I can see it all around me.”

And yet, in dozens of conversations with men and women here over the last few weeks, it is apparent few find much comfort in having escaped the worst of the downturn. In a year when both Bush and his Democratic challengers are intensely focusing their appeals on the middle class, these middle-class streets faintly vibrate with anxiety about the nation’s future.

In the short run, many fear the recession will submerge them. “Bush is wondering why people aren’t spending money,” says Mario Garcia, a 34-year-old boilermaker who enjoyed a good year in 1991 working on power plants and oil refineries. “Well, it’s hard to get confident when the chairman of General Motors announces 70,000 laid off in one shot.”

Anxieties about the nation’s long-term course run even deeper. Looking into the future, many see a nation inexorably losing ground to foreign economic competitors, slowly surrendering the affluence it built in better days.

“Unless we change our ways in a hell of a hurry,” says Bill McKee, a retired Kaiser steelworker, “we just can’t compete.”

High School to a Job, Then Money for House

Here were the rules of the world that allowed the McKees and families like his in blue-collar cities from Fontana to Detroit to prosper during the first decades after World War II: a man could graduate from high school, go to work at the steel mill or the auto plant, and, by scraping a bit, make enough money to buy a house and allow his wife to stay home and rear their children if she chose.

On quiet streets just above San Bernardino Avenue in the southeast part of town, you can find men and women who grew up by those rules still living in the homes where they reared their children.

But now, almost all of them agree, the world in which they thrived has vanished. “There’s no more good paying jobs,” Gene Fazio, a 47-year-old railroad worker, says with disgust as he stands in the driveway outside his home. “GM is gone; Kaiser is gone. There’s just no more.”

From across the driveway, his wife, Laurene, looks up from washing the family car, a new Toyota. “Now you need a college degree to work at McDonald’s,” she says.

A few blocks away, Ken Burford, a retired supermarket manager, wonders how his youngest son, a warehouse worker, will ever buy a house, even with lower interest rates, unless his wife goes to work. “It was easier for us, even though I had to work six days a week,” he says. “Now you can’t buy a house on (one) salary--even with union wages, you can’t do it.”

None of this is an abstraction to Marcia Mesa, 47, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy. Her two daughters from an earlier marriage and her stepson all live with her and her husband, a construction worker. All of the children are in their 20s and high school graduates. But though both of the girls have full-time jobs (the son is looking for work) neither can afford to live on her own.

“I think young people are the ones who have it the hardest,” she says, her words virtually tumbling over each other. “And I don’t think it’s going to be just temporary. Even if they can get a job, they are $6-$7 an hour jobs. How are they going to have a car, pay for insurance, find a place to live? No way.”

Some here discount those fears. Bill Kragness, an optometrist who serves as Fontana’s mayor, sees his children moving steadily ahead and wonders if Americans have become too gloomy to take advantage of the opportunities that are attracting millions of immigrants from around the world.

“Those people coming to this country are paying the United States the greatest compliment,” he says. “They’re coming here because life is better here, because there’s more opportunity.

“The opportunities are there,” he adds, “it’s just a matter of whether you want to work for them. I think that’s what the new immigrants recognize that maybe the natives have forgotten.”

More common, though, is a nervous sense that opportunities are narrowing. Jim and Phyllis Moore, who live a few blocks south of Marcia Mesa, have reared five children on his salary as a truck stop manager. If she were a newlywed today, Phyllis, 48, says, “there is no way we could afford to raise five kids.” She looks at the pressures confronting her children and their friends--trying to rear their own children with both parents working--and wonders how families can hold together.

“It is a lot rougher today,” she says, as Jim nods behind her. “Now with the economy the way it is, there’s not the time for family. I think that is a great part of what’s wrong with the country. Without a sense of family, you can’t find your sense of respect, your identity, your values. Most kids, if they don’t find it at home, they’re not going to find it at school.”

Jim steps forward toward the door from the shadows of the family living room. He talks about pending layoffs at GM and IBM in a heavy voice, as if lamenting an old friend who has lost his way.

“We’ve got to get back to where the United States was,” he says finally, looking out into the fading afternoon sun. “There’s got to be an upheaval of our institutions to get back to where people can afford to live.”

Better Air and More High School Graduates

Memory always burnishes the past and slights the present. From the first days of the Republic, Americans have periodically feared that its best years had already passed.

In many respects, the United States today is unquestionably a better country than the one in which Gene Fazio and the Moores were reared. Since World War II, the United States has dismantled state-sponsored segregation, substantially cleansed its air and water and seen the percentage of young people graduating from high school rise from just one-fourth in 1940 to over three-fourths 40 years later.

But, on the most basic measure on economic well-being, the nation has unquestionably faltered.

From 1947 through 1973--a period roughly paralleling the years of plenty at Fontana’s Kaiser Steel Works--the median family income in the United States doubled from $17,765 to $35,474, measured in constant dollars. This powerful rise in living standards lifted millions of Americans into middle-class comfort unimaginable to parents who had suffered through the Depression.

But since 1973, the median family income has failed to advance. It stagnated through the late 1970s, dipped in the two recessions of the early 1980s, turned back up slowly toward the end of the 1980s and then slipped again in the current recession. Today, it stands at $35,353, which means that over the last 18 years living standards in America have slightly lost ground.

Except for the Depression, says Jeffrey G. Williamson, a professor of economics at Harvard, “I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like” this long-term stagnation in the standard of living.

Even that sour conclusion can understate the true nature of the economic strain on American families. Because average hourly wages for Americans, adjusted for inflation, are 12% lower now than in 1973 (wages today, in fact, have slipped back to their level in 1965), the main factor that has prevented family incomes from actually falling is an increase in both the number of mothers who have entered the work force and the number of hours they work. In the 1950s and 1960s, about one-fourth of women with children worked outside the home; today two-thirds do.

This exodus has allowed millions of families to maintain a middle-class life, but at a high cost. National polls leave little doubt that millions of Americans feel squeezed, strained and strapped--not only economically, but even more acutely in terms of time.

“There is simply no time,” says Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who has examined attitudes toward family life. “When I listen to these people . . . they have a sense of being on a treadmill and that someone has turned up the machine from level three to level seven.”

That sense of agitated acceleration is palpable in Southridge Village, a huge new subdivision at the south end of Fontana whose moderate prices have attracted hundreds of younger families seeking their first homes. On these clean and quiet new streets, where children of all colors chase each other through afternoons bathed in lazy sunshine, many feel stretched to their limits.

To find a house they can afford, many of these families have had to move as much as 60 or 70 miles from their jobs in Los Angeles or Orange County. And even then, they find they can pay the mortgage and taxes and utility bills only if both parents work--leaving less time for either to spend with their children.

Arlen van Vuren, raking his lawn at the end of a sunny block here on a day off, fairly bristles as he talks about the pressure on his family. Every day, he leaves early in the morning with his wife to commute to their jobs at Hughes Aircraft in Fullerton 45 miles away; she recently returned to work, three months after the birth of their daughter. “She had to,” he says. “We couldn’t go any longer without her income.”

Day care is a constant juggle. When they head out for their 6 a.m. shift, they take with them their 9-year-old son who attends elementary school near his grandmother’s house in Fullerton, so they can pick him up in the afternoon. They have had to hire a baby-sitter to watch their infant daughter. “There goes the savings account,” he says ruefully.

Van Vuren, 32, worries if defense cutbacks will endanger his own job. And he wonders where he will get the money to help his wife’s teen-age daughter by a previous marriage attend college. “It’s the only way she’s going to be able to make it--get a sheepskin,” says Van Vuren, who went to work immediately after high school himself. “But the thing now is, how can anybody afford college when you have to dump all of your money into buying a house?”

Wincing at the strains on his own life, Van Vuren can’t imagine how his children will cope when they try to start their own families. “I’m surviving,” he says, “but what about my kids? The way it is now, the American dream seems to be just for the rich.”

If anything, as in the national polls, it is the youngest here who are the most optimistic about the future. Jeanette Ulepic, who works for a Marriott in Fullerton, expects the economy to turn back up through the 1990s. But she admits she is surprised to find herself at 24 living with relatives of her fiance, an ex-Marine and Gulf War veteran trying to get a job with the Los Angeles Police Department, while they try to save enough money to buy a house.

“I figured by this time I’d have my own place,” she says. “It feels like we are never going to be out on our own.”

A few miles north of Southridge, in the older and more weathered homes around Cypress Avenue and Athol Street, the economic anxieties are closer to the surface. Mike Wiles, 35, a big beefy man with a greasy shirt and an open manner, works as a welder at California Steel Industries Inc., which operates on a small part of the old Kaiser complex with a non-union work force. But, like many of his neighbors on these gritty streets, pockmarked with empty lots and rusting autos, he feels as though he is running in place.

“The money in the steel mill is better than anywhere else around here, but they’re not even keeping up,” he says. “We’re back to the wages they were paying in the ‘70s.” He pauses and looks at his modest home, and the 25-year-old Volkswagen he’s working on in the driveway. “As you can see, we’re not all living like kings either.”

Wiles would like to think things will be better for his son, Chris, an 18-year-old senior at Fontana High School. But he looks at the failures of leadership in both government and big business, and he’s not optimistic. “I don’t see any better trend down the road,” he says without rancor. “We’re so far in the hole now, I think it’s going to completely fall apart on us.”

Immigrants Taking Jobs, Some Complain

People in Fontana have difficulty fixing blame for the nation’s economic distress--either the recession or the longer-term pressure on living standards. Explanations fly from frustrated lips like bullets, landing in unpredictable patterns that obliterate neat distinctions between liberal and conservative.

Some blame immigrants for taking good jobs; other complain that the cost of welfare has pushed up their taxes to unmanageable heights. Many say politicians indebted to special interests have lost sight of the national interest--a collective dereliction of duty symbolized by the huge national debt that paralyzes the government and leaves the next generation not investments but mounting bills. Others indict corporate executives for moving jobs abroad; even more complain that Japan and other trading partners are competing unfairly. More than a few shake their fists at all these targets and yet still wonder if American workers and managers have simply lost the will to excel.

Though people here are uncertain about the cause of the nation’s economic difficulties, they unite around one point: They want Washington to shift its focus from remaking the world to rebuilding America. “I understand everybody’s got problems,” says Wiles, in a comment echoed through dozens of conversations. “But we got our own people here starving while we’re giving money to everybody else.”

Those sentiments are taking a measurable toll on Bush’s popularity. Bush carried Fontana in 1988 en route to rolling up a huge margin in the Southern California suburbs--and suburbs like them around the nation.

In 1992, for the first time, suburban communities like this one are expected to cast a majority of the votes in the presidential election. And if Fontana is any guide, Bush must mend some fences to gain their allegiance again.

Few blame him for the recession itself. But many fault him--often angrily--for appearing disengaged from their problems, seemingly more interested in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine than Youngstown and Union City.

“He should concentrate more on the United States,” says Kevin Johnson, the loading-dock worker. “Every time I see him on the news, I see him overseas, talking about what he’s going to do here and there. Well, what’s he going to do about his own back yard?”

Mario Garcia wonders whether the President really understands the strains families are facing: “Maybe he doesn’t read the newspaper like the average American or watch the news . . . he just doesn’t come out to see what is actually going on.”

Adds Harry Gregg, a Metropolitan Water District maintenance supervisor: “He took too long to realize there’s a problem with the economy.”

Still, Bush retains significant reservoirs of support. Recalling his stand against Saddam Hussein, many see Bush as resolute and strong--”a guy who doesn’t want to be pushed around,” as Doug DeThomas, a 24-year-old construction worker, puts it.

And, although none of the announced Democratic presidential candidates have made much of an impression, some in these fiscally conservative suburbs fear for their wallets if the party regains power. “I see the Democrats as the enemy of the working family,” says Ana Montelongo, a 25-year-old homemaker. “They just promote so many programs that spend our tax dollars.”

Such anger--at one target or another--is common behind these doors. But it is the diffuse anger of disappointment, not the sharpened indignation of insurrection. Most are uncertain, at best, that a change in political leadership will produce a change in national priorities--or even that a change in national priorities would significantly ease the pressures on their lives.

In discussions about the difficulties of buying a home, or saving for their children’s education, or rearing a family with both parents juggling jobs and long commutes, many people here betray an almost unconscious sense of inexorability--a belief that these are the rules of modern life, so immutable that it barely makes sense even to discuss them.

And yet while the tone in these conversations approaches resignation, it never quite settles there. In a nation that has regarded optimism as its birthright, many here have lost faith that the future will be as bright as the past. But they still hope that they are wrong.