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That's the kind of life he's had to live, one where sacrifices have to be made -- a life unlike the runaway fiscal policy of the president he supports.
Marlene Young was the last Democrat elected to the Polk County Board of Commissioners in Central Florida. That was in 1996, when she won re-election for a third term. In 2000, Polk County voters pulled the lever for George W. Bush by a 10 percent margin. After 12 years of public service, Young, a moderate, was tossed out, while Republicans captured all five commission seats.Yet Polk and its county seat, Lakeland, are anything but the picture of economic well-being. Nearly 20 percent of its children live in poverty and the median household income is a modest $36,036. The city has a movie-lot quality. The commercial strips, save for a Super Wal-Mart and a Target on the edges of town, look as if they haven't seen new facades since 1973.
Young sits in her real estate office in a shopping center in nearby Winter Haven. She still can't put her finger on the "why," three years after the election that knocked her out of politics.
"I'm a Democrat who's been turned out of office by registered Democrats, who are essentially voting Republican," Young says. "For a long time, I've looked and been dismayed at, you know, why are people who are not being well-served by these [Republicans] in office, or by this party and the platform -- why do they continue to support it?"
She's come up with various theories, none of which quite satisfy her.
"The Republican Party is certainly seen as the party of wealth and influence and power and the country clubbers, all of those things that the poor working shmucks strive to be," Young says. "It's almost a wannabe mentality."
Then, Young attributes the change to Clinton's sex scandals and "because the Republicans have so effectively characterized us as free-wheeling, tax-spending, social-promoting freeloaders."
And yet, Young says, it "s these very same people who are indignant about the huddled masses getting a crack at their money, who clamored when she was in office for more services and lower taxes.
"It just . . . seemed to be a dwindling of responsibility," she says. "People more and more just seem to be looking at their own individual self-interests rather than the larger interests that may be necessary for all of us to live together."
Neil Combee is a farmer, a Republican, and a 13-year member of the commission. He sounds ancient on his cell phone, which he often answers while driving his tractor in his fields out on the edge of an area of Polk County called the Green Swamp. But it's just the stress of getting over the flu. He explains the shift to the GOP more coarsely than Young. Voters are "tired of paying people who sit around all day on their butts."
Never mind, of course, that it was the Democrat Clinton who signed the welfare-to-work legislation and famously declared an end to the era of big government. There aren't too many people left cashing government checks each month, but in conversations with a number of white Southern voters, the bugaboo of welfare moms was cited as a reason they plan on voting Republican.
Lakeland's Darrell Conaster, 45, a firefighter in the Winter Haven department, closely identifies with John Kennedy, like Carlton Sparks, even though he largely missed those years. When he was in high school during the mid-1970s, "you still had the utopia of the Kennedys, you know, everybody helping one another. That's the mindset that I had. That's why I considered myself a Democrat. Republicans were the well-to-do party. I never considered myself that way. I'm more down to earth."
Conaster lives with his wife of 14 years, and two children. While he says he gets his news from local television and "balances it out" with reports from Pat Robertson's 700 Club, Conaster also thinks The Ledger, the local New York Times-owned newspaper does a fair job.
He's spent 18 years as a firefighter with Winter Haven and works a second job, running Faith Lawn & Tree Service. His wife works as an office manager so his children can attend a private Lutheran school. Public schools "force your children to learn things that are not your family values," says Conaster, citing evolution.
God informs Conaster's voting. Conaster attends the local Family Worship Center, an offshoot of the conservative Kenneth Hagin Ministries which spawned self-help televangelists like Kenneth Copeland and other preachers who sound more like motivational speakers at business conventions than typical preachers. In his version of the Bible, and the one Conaster describes his minister discussing on Sundays, God wants you to be rich. It's here that Marlene Young's contention that Americans identify themselves, whether they're wealthy or not, with the party of financial success makes sense. Conaster can't see it working in his own life, yet he doesn't have a populist's suspicion of success.
