Sounding Off : Via Videotape, Small Business Owners Give Bush, Clinton the Word

In a television studio last week, Laguna Hills tax preparer Marilyn Ratliff looked calmly into a camera and spoke frankly about what was ailing America.

“The regulations are getting so horrendous that small businesses can’t do business; they just fill out paperwork,” she said. “It’s frustrating, and nobody seems to be listening.”

With any luck, President Bush or his challenger, Bill Clinton, will hear her out.

Ratliff was among an initial group of Southern California small business owners to take up an Irvine production company’s offer to speak their minds to Bush and Clinton in 10-minute videotaped segments.

Effective Visual Imagery, which is offering the service free to small business owners, started taping the studio-produced messages last week and plans to ship copies to the national headquarters of each candidate.

The idea came to Doyle Potter, the company’s co-owner, after he became fed up with sound bites and stump speeches by candidates who didn’t seem to be addressing the concerns of small businesses, which provide most of the nation’s jobs.

“This will get the message out there,” Potter said. “The average company, the small company, doesn’t have access to the candidates or the media.”

So far, about half a dozen people have signed up to vent their views. Potter’s offer is restricted to owners of businesses with annual sales between $500,000 and $10 million. The 10-minute segments resemble video letters more than “infomercials.” Noticeably absent are TelePrompTers and slick graphics.

“Usually, you feel really good just venting your views,” Potter said. “It’s all dependent on whether people want to take the first step to say something.”

Mark Vawter, 41, read his seven-page message in a calm, careful tone, glancing occasionally at his typewritten speech. He owns Counseling Assessment Rehabilitation Experts, a vocational rehabilitation business in Orange.

Vawter outlined a program of job training, New Deal-type public works projects and small business tax incentives to get the disadvantaged and disabled back to work.

“Small businesses have been the new-job engine for the past decade,” he said. “Small businesses deserve government funding to help alleviate the impact of unemployment for the disabled and poor.”

After he concluded with, “Thank you, and good luck to both candidates,” his wife, Karen, sitting on a chair nearby, said, “Didn’t shake your fist enough.”

Vawter said after the taping that he hasn’t been politically active until this year. The taping, he said, was a chance he didn’t want to pass up.

“There’s hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses like mine that feel the same way,” he said. “We get bombarded by sound bites. This is as close as I will ever get, as a small business owner, to talking to a candidate. I can talk back to them.”

So far, the messages also are free of partisan politics.

“I’m torn,” said Ratliff, 47. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m worried about Clinton because he has a budget, but I’m not sure how he will fund it. But I’m pro-choice, and George Bush scares me to death on that issue.”

Vawter voted for Michael S. Dukakis in 1988 but became a “silent supporter” of Bush when he took office. Now, with the recession two years old, he is leaning toward Clinton, but he hasn’t made up his mind yet.

“I can really appreciate what George Bush tries to do to stay the course,” he said. “But what has happened has been too much of a laissez-faire attitude, and the economy has ground to a halt. I’m disappointed he’s not been more of a player in marching down to Congress and giving his vision thing to them.”

The messages grew in part from Potter’s own frustrations in owning a small business with a web of government regulations and the burden of the recession.

“July and August of last year were the worst two months that we had,” Potter said. “We started laying off-- right-sizing is the buzzword, so people don’t feel bad.”

Potter and his partner, Lee Henseler, were forced to trim their staff from 15 to six employees, cut health benefits and forgo their own salaries. Later in the year, their company was hired to tape Clinton’s speech at a breakfast hosted by Roger W. Johnson, chairman and president of computer parts maker Western Digital Corp. in Irvine, and developer Kathryn Thompson of Newport Beach.

Because there is no guarantee that the candidates--or even their staffs--will watch the messages, Potter is also sending the tapes to CNN.

He said he hopes that the television network can fit some of the speeches, even if it means trimming them, into a news segment.

“Hopefully,” he said, “we will get a bite or two that will get the message across.”