Southlanders Seem Resigned to Biting Bullet : Reaction: From Westlake Village to South-Central Los Angeles, Clinton’s call for tax increases provokes only mild complaints.

One waited for the President with a pit bull named Eightball in his lap. One scribbled notes with a gold Cross pen. Yet another reared up from her reclining chair to testify “Mmmm-hmmm!” Five more crossed their arms--and hoped.

Of all the constituencies that were asked by President Bill Clinton to bite the bullet Wednesday night, Southern California was perhaps the nation’s hardest sell.

Here in the land of idled developers and defense plants, of pink slips and foreclosure signs, the recession is still mentioned in the present tense. And tax increases are scarcely mentioned at all.

But even here--where the sunshine and the memory of the booming ‘80s just seem to make humble pie taste all the worse--the hour-plus speech was borne with forbearance and only a little complaint in locations from affluent Westlake Village to beleaguered South-Central Los Angeles.

“Clinton is the man in office. You’ve got to go with him,” sighed executive Terry Herrick, still in his starched white shirt and tie as he munched nuts from a glistening cut-glass bowl. “I think the President is correct in saying that you could have a second-rate country because of the deficit. This problem has to be attacked.”

That’s not an easy admission for someone like Herrick. His ox stands to be gored under the Clinton plan. A partner in a firm that owns 52 Jack in the Box franchises, Herrick, together with his wife, Annie, brings in more than $180,000 a year.

That income has provided him with a ranch house in Westlake Village, with a pool and a back yard patio. It has bought him a gracious cream-and-maroon family room and the expensive gold pen with which he recorded his thoughts Wednesday on the speech.

The 55-year-old businessman said Clinton’s income tax increase for people like him would probably cost him a vacation next year. But for one night, at least, Herrick was a sport--mainly, he said, because the proposed tax hikes were accompanied by proposed spending cuts. “I think he’s doing the right thing,” he said.

At the other end of the income spectrum, Maria Garcia and her neighbors seemed to agree with Herrick. As Clinton talked of matters close to their hearts--immunizations, Head Start, welfare reform--the tenants of the Mission Plaza apartments in Lincoln Heights crossed their arms before their chests and listened closely from Garcia’s couch, hopeful for the first time in years.

“Twelve years ago, nobody paid any attention to us,” said Garcia, a welfare mother who spent 15 years working at a garment district sweatshop before she was laid off five years ago.

“We had no jobs, no money. I think Clinton will do something,” she said.

Garcia and her husband--who has not worked since 1991, when he lost his job at Dodger Stadium--know intimately the feeling of having toiled most of a lifetime with little to show for it. Both said they would go back to work tomorrow if they could find a job that paid more in wages and benefits than they can get on the welfare rolls.

“It’s a good idea, getting people off welfare,” Maria Garcia said. “I want to get training.

“But when you finish job training, will you find a job? That’s my question.”

Yet the Garcias and their neighbors--a housekeeper, a housewife, an unemployed factory worker--were heartened at the talk of a broadened health care system and the demand that the well-off be called upon to ante up.

“We all have to sacrifice for a better future,” said Elena Yandell, an unemployed mother of two. “All these people who accumulated all this wealth. What good do they do when there are all these homeless people on the street? Paying a little more taxes is not going to hurt them that much.”

Geneva Jenkins, a 70-year-old South-Central retiree felt the same way about better-off Social Security recipients.

Leaning forward from her black reclining chair, dining from a TV tray, Jenkins had little sympathy for those retirees who make so much in benefits and other income that they would be taxed under Clinton’s plan.

“If they don’t really need it to live on, they should be taxed,” said Jenkins, whose own $800-a-month Social Security check barely covers the mortgage on her home.

“Once you get over that ($2,000-a-month benefits threshold), you can afford to be taxed without crying about it.”

Jeff Sutliff, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure about the fairness of Clinton’s plan.

In fact, he waited for the speech with a look on his face that was almost as fierce as the mug of Eightball, his trusty pit bull.

Sutliff rebuilds transmissions for a living. He makes $31,244 a year. And while he knows that a nation’s economy is much harder to fix than any engine, word that the President wants to raise taxes--even a little--was enough to give him the blue-collar blues.

“I’m a single man, so I already pay a full one-third of my salary in taxes,” Sutliff fumed as Clinton detailed his new initiative. “My credit has been bad for a long time. Now, I’ve got a new truck, trying to build it back up. With these new taxes, I could lose it all.”

At 29, Sutliff rents a home in Northridge with three other single men--his head just above the financial waters. His paycheck leaves just enough for a weekend of fishing each month. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to put him over the $30,000 threshold beyond which taxpayers can expect to pay more under Clinton’s plan.

As he listened to the call for improved health care, immunization for children and more attention paid to schools, Sutliff could only shake his head.

“What about the taxes? How are we going to pay for all this? Why do they always save the worst news for last?” he complained.

Sure, he noted, he voted for Bill Clinton. And sure, he expected more taxes. But until now, he said, he always thought the money would come from deeper pockets than his.

Smiling wryly, he switched off the song “Call Me the Working Man” by the heavy-metal rock group, Rush, to better hear the President’s speech. Still wearing the soiled work shirt with his name sewn on the right breast, Sutliff joked about sicking Eightball on the Clinton tax plan. Or posting the President’s photo on the dartboard down at the shop.

But all joking aside, Sutliff said, what bothered him was the principal of the thing.

“I’ll just have to see how bad I’m hurting when I get my paycheck,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like a whole lot. But it’s still more taxes.”

Times staff writers John Glionna, Somini Sengupta, Consella Lee and Carol Watson contributed to this story.