ONE WOMAN, ONE VOTE : This Time, the Southland’s Newest Radical Plans to Hedge Her Bets

Meet Dorothy, the Southland’s newest radical. Dorothy works in an industry, trucking, that was deregulated under the last Administration, which means that dozens of tiny, non-union companies sprang up and undercut the competition before, undercapitalized, they folded into nothing again. Dorothy’s company, unable to compete with the upstarts, was absorbed by a larger company, and then by a larger company still. Suddenly, the union was reduced to pleading not for more, but for not quite so much less. Usually, it didn’t even succeed at that. Nobody was playing by the old rules anymore.

The office where Dorothy had worked for more than half of her life was shut down as a cost-cutting measure. Many of her friends lost their jobs. Dorothy, only a couple of years away from a pension, also lost her job, but she had almost 27 years of seniority, enough to wangle a worse-paid position at another office significantly farther from her home--at least it was work. At one point, management moved her desk onto a noisy loading dock, hoping that she would quit in disgust. Dorothy may be a young 50, but she had worked a long time for her pension. So much for the invisible hand.

Her industry was necessary, continued to flourish, and was not threatened by Japanese competition. “The money didn’t just disappear,” she is fond of speculating. “Somebody’s getting it--just not us.” She has similar ideas about the missing billions in the savings-and-loan scandal, and the national debt.

Even though Dorothy has lived alone for the most part, and raised two daughters as a single parent, her union salary had been sufficient for a powerful sports car, trips to South America, a small vacation place in Mexico, a Jacuzzi, a nice house on a leafy, secluded street in a pleasant Eastside suburb. Her friends mostly have these things, too--if you worked hard in America, you used to be entitled to something like the good life, not to mention a step up for your children. Dorothy had the good fortune to come of age in the early ‘60s, at a time when the working American was really pretty prosperous.

And prosperity had made Dorothy, along with most of her friends, fairly conservative. She despaired of Cadillac-driving welfare mothers and believed that small businesses were being nibbled to death by government regulation. Her brother used to sit at the dinner table on Thanksgiving and argue that Congress should let the President lower capital-gains taxes, even though nobody present had ever really had a capital gain nor was likely to in the future. This was the secret of the ‘80s: Everyone believed that he or she had been issued a ticket to the Big Casino; everyone was ready to swap his or her current happiness for a shot at what lay behind Door Number Two. Dorothy didn’t mind the government’s coddling of the wealthy because, in her heart of hearts, she believed that one day she would be wealthy, too.

But these days, Dorothy doesn’t think that wealth is so much linked to virtue. She came out early for Perot this year, for the usual reasons--to send a message to the politicians, because he seemed to speak his mind--and later she became disillusioned with him for the usual reasons. She loathes taxes as much as the next woman, but she doesn’t see why library hours have to be cut to almost nothing or why school budgets are being slashed when high school graduates can’t balance a checkbook. She knows too many 30-year-olds who are moving back in with their parents. She went to a show-bizzy Clinton fund-raiser a couple of weeks ago--”I saw Louis Nye there!” she cried--and came back enthusiastic about the candidate. She doesn’t even like chocolate-chip cookies. She remembers cities she visited in Peru and Brazil where the rich live in heavily guarded mansions and the poor live in tin shacks, and she knows which side some of her friends will be on if our economy gets much, much worse.

Dorothy isn’t much of a radical, but she’s voting for Clinton Tuesday. There are worse things than inflation. There are the Casino’s terrible odds.