25-Year Prism Filters Politics, Ideology

These are the faces of political chaos, here at the tag end of the 20th century, the women and men who will choose our next president--seemingly in spite of the candidates who woo them and the very parties they represent.

There is Michael Currie, a Republican environmentalist who rides his bike to work and will vote for Bill Clinton; Keiko Noda Fehmel, who started out Democratic, but moved right when Santa Monica imposed rent control on landlords, like her family; and Marie Lopez, a Democrat who grew up in a housing project dependent on welfare, but would deny that benefit to many who follow and wouldn’t vote for our current president if forced at gunpoint.

“If my dad was alive,” she says with ardor, “I know what he’d say: Get rid of that man!”

It has, by now, become a central dogma of American politics that party labels and traditional loyalties mean little anymore. Voters, more than ever, seem untethered. Impatient, too.

“American voters channel-surfed right past a Republican president in 1992 and a Democratic Congress in 1994, looking, in my judgment, not so much for a different party but for a different spirit in the land, something better,” former Gen. Colin L. Powell wrote in his autobiography last year.

For both parties, the voters’ twitchiness poses a deep problem. Clinton may hold a lead in polls for months, then watch it melt away in days. And, even if one gets elected, this behavior among the voters may have left the country impossible to govern--as both parties have found, to their dismay.

Cobbling together a coalition, getting anything done in government today is “as difficult as it has been in the most difficult periods of our history,” says political analyst Kevin Phillips.

That is the theory; here is the reality:

Members of the Venice High School Class of 1971 were among the first 18-year-olds to be guaranteed a vote. A quarter of a century ago, they cast their initial ballots. Now, as they describe their lives and their experiences, one begins to see the outlines of how a nation can become fragmented by competing pressures of economy, culture and mistrust of government--how a common vision can be sundered in part by technology and an expanding media.

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Marie Lopez, proud mother of two, gets through her 25th high school reunion in much the same way that she traversed adolescence: so close to the farthest edge of the action that in begins to resemble out.

It did not help back in 1971 that she was poor and partially deaf, or that her family lived on welfare, each ingredient alone enough to ensure what Lopez describes as a start-to-finish “rough life.”

“I was always teased as a kid because of my clothes,” she recounts as she watches the reunion dinner from a table in the farthest corner of the ballroom. “My older sister made some of my things. People would say, ‘Can’t you afford a decent dress?’ And I’d say, ‘I have a dress on, thank you.’ ”

This woman, who sells baby clothes at K mart for a living, is talking about politics when she reaches into her purse, unbidden and pulls out a picture of her entire world: Michelle, 6, and Michael, 8, smiling with Christmas tree in a department-store snapshot.

This is not interruption but rather visual aid for a woman who has taken every step of her political life in stride with a member of her family.

Her precinct-working mother dragged Lopez to citizenship at the earliest possible moment.

Her father--long dead--still keeps her in line with his allegiance to a party, if not to its candidates: “My dad was a die-hard Democrat, so I feel like he’ll throw thunderbolts if I change.”

Her children fuel the issue that is closest to her heart--and perhaps farthest from her party. Inez Marie Beam Lopez, 41, abhors abortion.

“It took 11 years for me to get pregnant. When I found out I was pregnant, I was stunned. I called my husband and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, tell me another joke.’ ”

She strokes the tiny family picture and continues. “It irks me that people make mistakes and want to get rid of them when other people want them so much. That’s my issue.”

With her husband, Michael, Lopez struggles to make ends meet. They have two children, two salaries, no college degrees, no breaks. They are living proof of the so-called income gap and its crap-shoot effect on personal politics.

The chasm separating the earning power of the rich and the poor has grown at an “unprecedented” rate and is at its widest since World War II, says Lynn Karoly, senior economist at Rand Corp.

One of the most striking changes since Lopez graduated from Venice High and married her high-school sweetheart is the marked increase in wage disparity between those with college educations and those without.

No single factor caused this gap; there is probably no “magic bullet” to reverse it. And its impact on politics is still uncertain.

Four decades of poverty, 11 years of infertility and a father whose influence reaches beyond the grave combine to make Lopez a Republican in Democrat’s clothing, a wild card in the 1996 presidential race.

Her voting history: Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Perot. Her voting future: Uncertain. Her voting philosophy: Do it and hope that it counts.

“Sometimes I think they put our votes in the toilet or throw ‘em in the square file,” she sighs. “It doesn’t matter what you hope for.”

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Michael Currie, an angry Republican, plans to send a message when he steps into the voting booth: He’s tired of what he calls his party’s meanness. He hates what seems to him an unforgiving stance on the very private issue of abortion.

GOP environmental policies give this nature-lover the chills. And he’s appalled, he says, that legislators are generous with their own salaries but stingy with the Social Security checks on which his mother survives.

“The last election I voted Democratic, and I plan to vote for Clinton again,” he says. “In fact, I make a point of voting for Clinton as a Republican to show the party how I feel.”

National polls paint a murky picture of where voters stand in relation to the troubled two-party system; all that is consistent is volatility. Party identification ebbs and flows from one month to the next. Support for a third party is just as unsteady.

The most volatile segment of the electorate contains white voters without a college education--the group most hurt by rising income inequality and the one to which Michael Currie belongs.

Currie’s political shift from right to left has been difficult and long. Loyalty to country made him plan to join the military when he graduated from high school at the height of Vietnam. Loyalty to family kept him home in Mar Vista instead and put that young man’s dream on hold.

“I had to go to work to help out at home,” he says simply. His father left when Currie was 3. His mother kept the family fed on the slender salary of a professional baby-sitter. When cap and gown came off, he says, “I had to get a regular job.”

Loyalty to his party kept Currie a Republican through thick and thin; these days, it’s mostly thin. His relationship with the Grand Old Party began to fray in the middle of the Reagan years, as the religious right became increasingly welcome and he did not.

Currie didn’t change, he insists; his party did.

“I’m having serious doubts,” he laments. “I’m seriously considering changing to Democrat. I just don’t like the way the . . . party’s gone. It’s swung too far to the right . . . at the cost of so much forbearance toward other people.”

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Listen for a moment to Richard Haskins, who will vote for Bob Dole but agrees with Bill Clinton on what sounds like the heart of the Democratic agenda: abortion rights (yes), school prayer (no), gay rights (why not?) and even gun control (sure).

He grew up in a Democratic household, where his Depression-era grandfather viewed Franklin Delano Roosevelt as “God.” “Being a Democrat was inherited. It’s just what everyone was.”

Everyone but Haskins himself: “Liberal views never made any sense to me.” A third-generation roofer with a profitable, Santa Monica-based family business, Haskins sees himself as a true Republican.

The core of his belief system hinges on ideas learned as a finance student at West Los Angeles City College and Cal State Northridge. Liberal economics, Haskins explains, “always sounded like a lot of wannabe: ‘We’d like it to be this way, so we’ll come up with a theory to make it this way.’ ”

That made no sense to a young man who, from his elementary-school days, had worked in a business guided by all-too-real cycles, economic and meteorological: Rain is good. Drought is bad. When folks have money, business is good. When they don’t, it’s bad.

Today, Haskins recoils at mention of government programs like affirmative action that do not mesh with his free-market views. “Look in the phone book under roofing,” he says, “and you’ll find that many Hispanics who started out working for someone else now own their own roofing businesses.”

It’s an open scramble up the economic ladder, and it started long before the advent of affirmative action, he says. “I don’t understand discrimination. It’s foreign to me. . . . But by telling people they’re disadvantaged, you get a disadvantaged mind-set.”

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Yelps of laughter and errant drumbeats drift in from a nearby ballroom; it’s reunion night and Venice High School’s bolder alumni are learning to hula.

Joyce Yoshimizu and Sheri Takata are content to sit this lesson out. Husbands at their sides, they reminisce about their “rowdy” days on an art deco campus graced with a statue of Myrna Loy.

The years have been kind to these lifelong friends, proud possessors of good careers, happy marriages, healthy children. Their conservatism is the inherited kind, handed down by parents who stressed the twin virtues of hard work and family.

Takata’s father owned a Lynwood garage, where he repaired cars while his wife kept the books. Yoshimizu’s family raised celery at a Venice nursery and later opened a flower shop in Little Tokyo. Why were she and her siblings so successful in life? “No one wanted to run the flower shop,” she jokes.

The women ponder a moment beneath the purple balloons before Takata suggests that their success--and their politics--were likely most shaped by the day in World War II when the U.S. government locked up Takata’s father in an internment camp in Wyoming and shipped Yoshimizu’s parents to Manzanar.

After the war, the families rebuilt their lives from scratch. For a child to dawdle verged on sacrilege. “They felt that for us to have a good life, they had to push us,” says Takata.

Both families saw education as the springboard to a higher level of the American Dream. Diligence was not open to debate. Both women attended UCLA, where Takata earned a degree in economics and became a certified public accountant. Yoshimizu received her R.N. and became a nurse practitioner.

A stint as a claims processor for Veterans’ Affairs was a rude awakening for Sheri Takata, a pivotal point in the political development that has made her a confirmed Republican. “They said, ‘You’re working too fast. You’re going to make everyone else pick up their pace,’ ” she recalls in anger. “I hated it! There is no incentive in the government to work hard.”

Yoshimizu agrees but admits to confusion. What, she wonders, is the proper balance between self-reliance and state assistance? As a pediatric nurse practitioner for the Los Angeles Unified School District, she works with children whose teeth rot because it takes so long to get subsidized dental care, who might never have a physical if not for the government.

“I think everyone is entitled to health care,” she says. “But they get trapped in the system. . . . I see a lot of people on welfare. They’re having so many kids and the state is paying for them.”

As a Republican who voted for Reagan and then Bush, this school nurse is in a quandary. Clinton--maybe--will do more for the children, she thinks. If so, she says, her voice suddenly soft, as if struggling with a burden: “I’ll probably pick Clinton.”

*

He started out with Democratic leanings and a Republican haircut. Today, he’s swapped his butch for a ponytail and a diamond earring, traded in his parents’ liberal views for a hard-earned belief in tougher crime measures.

Dr. Jack Laurie, the hip pediatrician who was voted to have the “best build” in his high school class, changed his look to remind himself to lighten up. He changed his politics for darker reasons.

His first ideological shift came when he opened a private practice in rural Illinois to pay off years of student loans. “You begin to feel the stress of the government bureaucracy,” says this son of old-line Democratic parents. “You realize how much goes to taxes.”

Then he went to work for a federally funded clinic and saw, firsthand, “how much waste there is.”

But it was a phone call a decade ago that clinched Jack Laurie’s conservatism. The news: His mother had been stabbed and beaten to death in her Westside apartment. Police found the bullet-riddled body of his 32-year-old brother three days later, in the trunk of a car.

The killer ended up in San Quentin after an investigation and trial, Laurie says, that “made me believe we need a system that is much tougher on crime.”

Today, Jack Laurie sits in a bright white chair beside a white baby grand piano in the immaculate living room of his Riverside home. Jennifer, his wife, is at his side. Gold-framed portraits of their two young daughters, carefree in ballet skirts and angel wings, adorn the room.

Their upscale neighborhood couldn’t seem safer. But the couple won’t let their children play out front. The cancer of crime, in their view, is systemic.

Other than crime, Laurie’s views tend toward the eclectic. He’d like to keep more of his hard-earned money, so he backs GOP-style tax cuts. He believes strongly in abortion rights. Dole’s critiques of Hollywood violence leave him cold and, in fact, the candidate doesn’t do much for him either.

But he’ll probably vote Republican anyway. Only the GOP, he believes, has the resolve to salvage society from the decay that lets crime flourish.

“Liberals,” he says, “have empathy, but their emotional, altruistic responses to [society’s] problems just don’t work.”

*

Dusk is filtering its way to earth in the little farming town of Lathrop, home to Terry and Beth Shapiro--he a systems analyst, she the cafeteria lady at the local elementary school.

The neighborhood boys play hoops in the driveway of the slate-blue clapboard house on J Street. The neighborhood wives buy Tupperware in the living room. Venice High graduate and father of two, Shapiro is a testament to the power of information--particularly new sources like the Internet and talk radio. He writes letters to the editor of the San Jose Mercury News, but he doesn’t buy it. He watches television news--more likely C-SPAN2 than the networks.

He gets regular e-mail from friends, long items copied from the NRA web site. In his lexicon, CNN means Clinton News Network, and rush is not a verb but the name of his hero--Rush Limbaugh, the radio talk show host--tossed off in casual first reference--”Rush said the other day. . . .”

For this conservative, political change means the strengthening of ideas that first stirred more than half a lifetime ago. His classmates protested against the war in Vietnam; Shapiro read body counts in the Santa Monica Evening Outlook and went to West Point.

“I would look forward to reading the number of Viet Cong we’d do away with,” he recalls. “I knew we’d kill more bad guys than we would lose. . . . I’d read about the protests and get very upset. Without knowing it, some conservative views began to form.”

Saigon fell the month before Shapiro finished West Point, but he’d already found a new cause. His parents had converted from Judaism to Christianity. Their son soon followed. His religious conversion, he said, helped him see the “tremendous amount of consistency” between Christian principles and conservative views.

“For a Christian to be pro-choice or in favor of an expanded welfare state is not in accordance with Christian principles,” he argues today.

“I feel like I would be right at home if I lived in flyover country instead of on the Left Coast in a media storm,” he adds. “I hate the 20th century.”

*

This is what it’s like to be 17 and hate yourself, to learn about the politics of race and culture way too young, to live in a housing project, to ache for more, to have no voice:

To be David Alvarez a quarter of a century ago.

Reality: “As a Hispanic during that time I felt not second class, but third class. Blacks had a voice in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Hispanics didn’t.”

Fantasy: “If I gained access into the white club, I had succeeded. For me to be accepted by people like [classmate] Betsy Skidmore--her dad was an engineer, they liked me--I felt, hey, I’ve arrived.”

Impact: “It made me feel less than.” And “it made me more wanting to fit in.” And “I almost despised that I lived in a housing project.”

But that’s where Alvarez--then class clown, now Christian minister--got his first lessons in race, class and politics. Everybody in Mar Vista Gardens loved the Kennedys, Catholic boys done good. Everybody in this Westside welter of Latinos, blacks and poor whites registered as a Democrat.

What choice was there? Especially if your best friend was Rick Taylor, student body president and Venice High agitator, the only boy in the ’71 yearbook photographed in flagrant violation of the no-sideburns dress code.

The friendship faded some, but Alvarez’s unalloyed allegiance to the Democratic Party lasted for more or less the next two decades--from the time he registered to vote feeling “giddy” with privilege, until the early 1990s, when he began, he says, to “harden.”

It lasted through three stabs at college, through jobs as various as shipping clerk and bartender, through his early years as a nondenominational minister.

Then the 1990s began, and two things happened. After several years of dealing with the needy--and the not-so-honest, not-so-needy--he began, he said, to realize how badly managed the welfare system is.

“I’ve always been a Democrat, because Democrats are concerned about the poor,” he says. “But I think I really began to grow hard toward the lavishness of the Democrats. I started moving toward the middle.”

When Dan Quayle “of all people” talked about the problems of single motherhood, Alvarez found himself nodding in agreement.

“Being involved in the church in Hollywood, dealing with single mothers and children, I realized how deprived those children were, not having a strong masculine figure to be with them, care for them and bless them,” says this Democrat who will vote for Clinton but has taken a big step toward the center.

“Dan Quayle, I’m with you.”

*

Could Bob Dole lasso Joyce Yoshimizu back into the Republican fold if he was a little better at compassion, paid a little more attention to children’s issues? Could Bill Clinton persuade Haskins to return to his roots with a promise to be more fiscally conservative?

“Every day I go to the other side,” says one Venice graduate, reflecting on the government. “One day I’m mad at the Clinton administration. The next day I’m angry at the Republicans. . . . I’m very undecided about November. I feel very, very insignificant in the world.”

How would you pull these people together to help a candidate become our next president?

Some argue the issue is economic. “It’s impossible for either political party to regain the trust or allegiance of a majority of the electorate unless they’re seen as making progress in improving the standard of living in the U.S.,” says Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist with the Economic Policy Institute. “There’s tremendous dissatisfaction.”

But even assuming that one party or the other could find the mix of policies needed to end that economic dissatisfaction, would that work?

Rick Taylor, the campus dissident who went on to parlay his 2.3 grade point average at Venice High into a $250,000-a-year job as a political consultant getting candidates elected, wonders himself at this new volatility and its impact on our political system.

“What we do in politics is try to lump certain economic and religious groups together,” Taylor says. But it is unclear to him that the tactics he has honed still work.

“Society is not as predictable and easy to lump together.”

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A Look Back at 1971

Much has changed since this year’s 25th Reunion class graduated from Venice High. Here is some of what took place during their senior year--1971.

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Bill Clinton: Was a student at Yale Law School, where he had recently met Hillary Rodham. He lived in a Milford, Connecticut beach house, where he and his roommates held lengthy rap sessions about the war in Vietnam.

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Bob Dole: Was halfway through his first term as U.S. Senator from Kansas. Described at the time as “an aggressive partisan,” he was named by President Richard M. Nixon to head the Republican National Committee.

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Los Angeles: Suffered through a 6.5 earthquake that claimed 60 lives and caused $1 billion in damage. The county also endured its first-ever carbon monoxide smog alert, as the environmental movement gained momentum throughout the region.

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Vietnam: Was still the site of 250,000 U.S. troops. An average of 45 American soldiers died each week that year, bringing the overall total to 45,250. President Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia during the course of the year, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers shed new light on the war’s origins.

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China: Hosted the U.S. table tennis team, beginning a new era of U.S.-China detente.

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The vote: Was granted to 18 year olds for the first time in American history.

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Women: Gained admission to the National Press Club, where the first four who ordered drinks were greeted with beer and attitude from the bartender: “Here you are, and I hope you choke on it.”

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Charles Manson--And three co-defendants were found guilty in the bloody slaying of Sharon Tate.