Clinton Speech Makes Hit With O.C. Residents

Rich or jobless, retired or in the prime of their taxpaying lives, Orange County residents interviewed during President Clinton’s speech on Wednesday expressed exultation at the prospect of change for the nation, tempered with wary uncertainty at how their own lives will be affected.

Borrowing the President’s own vocabulary of sacrifice and responsibility, the men and women all offered deeply felt impressions of the speech before listening to the opinions of other politicians or pundits.

Gene Dotson, for one, an unemployed aerospace worker living in Mission Viejo who decided to vote for Clinton while standing in an unemployment line, said he was “willing to sacrifice” if higher taxes were put to good use.

“If he can show us where it’s going to help in the future,” he said, “I’m willing to do it.”

Also willing to chip in were those at the other end of the income scale--exhibiting a nostalgic sense of noblesse oblige.

Toni Alexander, a Laguna Beach advertising executive who voted for George Bush last year, even seemed eager to do more than her share. “In the old days, I guess we would be called the aristocrats,” she said. “We as wealthy people have responsibility . . . not to let the country go down the drain. We have to forget that degree of selfishness we had through the ‘80s. We’ve got to give something back before the country falls apart.”

Between the extremes, county taxpayers each expressed their own troubles and dissatisfactions but seemed almost anxious to help the President.

Job at Hughes Lost

A year out of work, a week past his 50th birthday and about six months shy of having no savings, Dotson tuned into CNN, leaned forward and waited for Bill Clinton to show him the way back to the workplace.

He lost his job as a configuration manager when Hughes Aircraft closed its Rancho Santa Margarita plant, ending his decade-long career with the company, cutting off his $45,000 annual salary and dashing his family’s hopes to buy a home.

“It’s been depressing, discouraging,” the Air Force veteran said of his first non-working year since childhood. He and his wife, Jeannette, lost 65% of their income with the shutdown, and now rely on her child-care job. “I’m too old to start digging ditches, and I can’t find a job, other than flipping hamburgers or pumping gas.”

With those months of frustration and looming years of uncertainty, Dotson hoped to hear concrete plans from the new President about retraining defense workers, specific job creation tactics and a nationwide emphasis on technology. In the end, he said the nuts and bolts were vague, but that the new President seemed on track.

“Most of this we heard before,” he said as Clinton outlined his national service program. “But I do think he has plans, I think in the back of his head he knows where it’s headed.”

Ever since he was handed his pink slip on his 49th birthday, Dotson, who voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, said it has been hard to be upbeat.

“I’m discouraged because I’ve been out of work,” he said, “but I do feel I see a future down the road.” He pointed at the television screen, where Clinton had paused for yet another standing ovation. “If he can get 50% of the things he talked about tonight done, it would be great. Just great.”

Big Tax Hike Faced

Toni Alexander and Bill Strateman are the quintessential couple of the high-flying ‘80s: marketing entrepreneurs with six-figure incomes and a full-time housekeeper for their ocean-view home in a gated Laguna Beach colony.

If President Clinton’s sacrifice-and-spend program is passed, the two Republicans will be bumped into the 36% tax bracket for couples earning more than $180,000. Plus they would face the 10% surtax on income over $250,000.

It’s a big chunk of change any way you figure it, but neither Alexander, president of her own advertising and public relations firm in Newport Beach, or Strateman, a sports marketing consultant, seem to mind. If Clinton can deliver deficit reduction and spending cuts.

“We’re not going to have much of a choice,” said Alexander, 44, who had feared Clinton would be a tax-and-spend Democrat. Yet throughout the President’s speech, she shouted, “Amen!” at his plans to put those on welfare back to work and to increase investment tax credits for small companies such as hers. She also applauded proposals for tough crime legislation and investment in education and job training.

“Unless we grab the bull by the horns, things aren’t going to get much better in this country,” she said. “Anybody who saw any part of those riots in Los Angeles had to think, ‘How much longer can this go on before it spreads to every city in America?.’ ”

Her 45-year-old husband said he liked the “whats and whys” of Clinton’s speech. But he remained wary.

“I think we are all prepared to sacrifice, but we want to know how much it’s going to cost and how it’s going to be spent,” Strateman said.

Before a blazing log in their fireplace, the couple played a sort of “Siskel and Ebert” counterpoint, assessing Clinton’s talk.

Bill: “Let’s say this requires us to pay $20,000 more a year in taxes. Is that a better way to spend the money than to put it into goods and services in the economy?”

Toni: “That’s what Clinton was saying about switching the emphasis from consumption to investment. If we don’t invest that $20,000 in this country, there may not be a shopping center left to spend it in.”

Yet what mattered most was that their sons grow up in a prosperous nation. And while Strateman said he worried about Congress, found themselves willing to do something that had seemed an anathema before Wednesday night: Give Clinton a chance.

Family Income Dives

Dennis Hunter, 44, and his wife, Helen, watched the President’s address from an unaccustomed perspective: near the bottom of the middle class.

“When you ask us what part of the speech affects us,” Helen said. “Basically all of it.”

Over the past year the family’s income has plunged--from $48,000 in 1991 to $33,000 in 1992.

Dennis, a sheet-metal worker waiting for a building boom so he can return to installing air conditioning ducts in new homes, describes himself as unemployed.

His new status comes at a hard time, when his oldest son’s rising college tuition fees are busting the family budget and another son is making college plans. Helen, 42, operates a small party-planning business out of the home.

The Hunters wish they could afford to remodel their ranch-style home in Santa Ana. The ceiling above the couch from which he watched the President’s speech leaks during storms.

A year ago, the Hunters refinanced their mortgage to gain a little extra money to fight off the effects of recession.

“We are hurting,” Dennis said flatly.

The Hunters voted for Clinton in November, they said, hoping for “fundamental change.” They aren’t disappointed with the prospect of paying higher taxes, and even anticipated it. But their generosity comes with fear.

“If you want to tax me, you better spend it properly.” Dennis said he would tell the President in face-to-face talk.

Sitting quietly and close together on a couch during the speech, the Hunters nodded every time Clinton mentioned something they agreed with. Their two sons were uninterested and found other things to do.

“We have tried to be fiscally conservative,” Dennis Hunter said. “But it is getting tougher and tougher. So we have got to give Clinton a chance.”

‘Plan Not Quite Clear’

Duc Do, 53, watched the President’s speech hoping to hear solid answers to what he considers to be the nation’s top problems--the recession, joblessness and homelessness. Instead, Do said, the only specific plans he heard were for tax increases.

“I respect his determination,” Do said of Clinton. “He’s trying to do the best for the country. But his plan is not quite clear enough to solve the economy. Any plan will be helpful for the future. But how about now? Many people today are starving or are out of work.”

Clinton’s proposed energy tax is probably the only one that will hit him directly, said Do, a La Palma computer software engineer whose wife owns and operates a Westminster pharmacy. Together, the two earn about $100,000 a year, so he might end up paying $500 to $1,000 a year more under Clinton’s proposed taxes, he figured.

“I accept it,” Do said. “Myself, my family, I think we could afford that for the benefit of the future.”

But Do feared that the proposed tax increases will make everything cost more--not just gas and heat.

“When gasoline prices increase, everything increases, including food and medicine that directly affects you and me, the consumer,” said Do, who studied economics in Vietnam. He worried that food production and delivery costs would rise, cutting into neighbors’ paychecks and causing them to cut back on other expenses--like automobiles, refrigerators, his computer products and his wife’s pharmaceuticals.

Do said he believed that Clinton should focus on solving the recession before focusing on the deficit.

“Rather than talk about a tax increase in his first month in the White House, he should talk about a specific plan to help people,” he said.

Retirees Will Have Less

With nearly 20% of their combined family income of $39,000 coming from Social Security benefits, retirees Harold and Audrey Roberts will have less to spend if Clinton’s proposed economic package passes in Congress.

And even if it’s a few thousand dollars per year, it’s no small amount to the Anaheim couple who spent $50,000 to put one son through law school in Sacramento and $30,000 to put another through college in Santa Barbara. Last year, medical bills alone cost the couple $4,000.

But as they watched Clinton address Congress on their Zenith color TV from a wood-paneled living room decorated with their own paintings, they applauded the notion that only sacrifice will dig America out of trouble.

“We sacrificed during World War II and nobody thought anything about it,” said Harold Roberts, who spent 37 years as a high school teacher, mostly in the Garden Grove Unified School District. “Maybe we can learn to sacrifice this time.”

Both Harold, 67, and his wife Audrey, 65, a former medical technologist, voted for Clinton during the last election and do not fault him for previous promises not to touch middle-class incomes.

“Hey, Bush had underestimated the deficit by $50 billion or something,” Harold said. “If anyone was lying, it was Bush who lied.”

The Robertses believe that if they can give up more in taxes on their energy bills and Social Security payments, so can anyone who makes more than them.

“I eat well, I have a nice home,” Harold said. “I can give a little. There are thousands and thousands of people who have a lot more money than I do. I think they should give too.”

The Robertses believe that their tax money will be invested in a national health plan that will make medical care more affordable for all Americans. If not, they say, watch out.

“If I could be certain there would be a health plan with lower premiums for everyone, I would consider the taxes worth it,” he said. “But if I go along with it and nothing happens, there will be hell to pay.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Kristina Lindgren and Mark Platte and special correspondents Geoff Boucher, Robert Elston and Tom McQueeny.