SUN CITY CENTER, Fla., Oct 15, 2008
Gray Vote No Longer Reliably Red
Washington Post: In a Florida Retirement Community, Residents Are Uncharacteristically Split
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Senior couple on park bench. (CBS)
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The sign over the woodworking shop says "Sawdust Engineers," and there was a time when the men now bent over the tools used to put on ties or make sales calls, building their pensions so they could one day leave the rat race for this warm world of unbroken sunshine.
"Retirement is the best!" says Jerry Decker, 73, one of the Sawdust Engineers tinkering in the wood shop at this over-55 retirement community of 19,000 residents outside Tampa.
But the tranquillity of palm trees and wine gatherings that sustained Decker's dreams all those years in the snow has been upended by the financial crisis. Even here in paradise, nothing is for sure anymore.
"Who isn't afraid of getting a 'Dear John' letter from GM saying your pension is in danger?" he asks. "You look at all these companies and what they are doing. We worked so hard to put them first, and it's just not right for them to be reneging."
The other men share the outrage, spitting out the names of corporations and their golden parachutes and lavish indulgences.
"I wasn't invited to the AIG spa weekend, were you?" one asks aloud. "You didn't get the manicure?" another asks.
"If we ran a household like they ran their company, you'd be bankrupt in five months."
The Sawdust Engineers should be an easy sweep for Republican presidential nominee John McCain. All five are Korean War veterans and registered Republicans. George W. Bush nailed every one of their votes. But three weeks before the election, only three of them are supporting McCain.
Sun City Center is in the hard-fought electoral quadrant in Florida known as the I-4 corridor, home to 43 percent of the state's voters. The Republican Party has always counted on the retirees here to deliver in bulk, but this year a more severe calculation is at play. To win Florida, McCain needs to capture a bigger slice of older voters than President Bush won in 2004 to offset the high numbers of young voters supporting Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.
"I'm ready for a change," says Ed Bearer, a retired public school teacher from Delaware who recently received a letter saying his wife's medical expenses may no longer be covered under his pension plan. "McCain turns me off. I can't explain it," he says. He's voting for Obama.
That leaves Jerry Decker. Last week, during the second presidential debate, Decker kept waiting for McCain to come out swinging. "What he should have said was 'We're going to prosecute AIG to the fullest extent,' " Decker says. Instead, only vague promises to clean up corruption.
It's easy to see why Decker wants more heat from a candidate when his own steady discipline is compared with the reckless indulgence of Wall Street. For years, Decker brown-bagged his lunch, even when he went over to the corporate tower as a director of human resources for Formica Corp. His wife, Jeannie, was his barber. The Deckers had one son and the family lived fully but frugally: They were the ones on the side of the ski mountain with their lunch and cans of soda packed from home. Jeannie watched the budget, and for more than two decades she gave her husband $25 each Friday for his weekly spending money.
"It wasn't a sacrifice," Decker says. "We had a game plan to spend our retirement together."
But the game plan for many of the couple's friends at Sun City Center has been jeopardized by the financial meltdown. Decker hears the stories in the wood shop. Guys who took their company's advice and converted their pensions to 401(k) plans only to watch their holdings diminish by half when the market plunged. Jeannie tells him that some of the women are skipping their weekly trips to the beauty parlor and letting their hair go gray. More people their age are bagging groceries at the nearby Publix supermarket, and foreclosure signs, once unthinkable, are popping up in the trim Bermuda grass.
"I still believe in our country," Decker says. "But Jeannie and I don't have time to rebound. When you are 72 and 73, you don't have time to recoup."
The storefronts at the strip plazas serving Sun City Center say it all: pulmonary clinics, laser surgery, Beltone hearing aids, oxygen tank rentals, at Bob Evans and numerous pharmacies. Retirees zip around in golf carts, many of them outlandishly customized, including one that looks like a giant sombrero, complete with fringe. But spare these folks the Florida retiree jokes -- they've heard them all. Giving a tour of the aquatic facility, information director John Bowker mentions that four seniors have died in the Jacuzzi. "The most common sound around here is an ambulance," he says.
Once a solid hub of conservative retirees from the Midwest, Sun City Center has in recent years been set upon by newcomers who make for a less cohesive voting group -- "liberal Northeasterners," says Dee Williams, president of the Sun City Center Republican Club since 1991. In other words, blue-staters.
The influx of Democrats and McCain's tepid style of campaigning have Williams concerned enough to shoot off SOS e-mails to the Florida Republican Party warning that her turf cannot be taken for granted. "McCain is not bringing passion," says Williams, 80, sitting in her living room of blue sofas. "He has to convey to the public that what we are doing with the bailout, we had to do."
In her Missouri twang, Williams makes a direct appeal to her candidate: "You better get off your duff and show some fire. Send Sarah [Palin] and her husband to Michigan. If you are going to give up Michigan and you lose Florida, you lose."
The same morning Jerry Decker and the Sawdust Engineers are tinkering in their wood shop, a group of women called the Weavers are at their looms elsewhere in the activities center expressing ambivalence about McCain.
"He's flat, he's old, he doesn't seem enthused," says Jane Bolder, 69, a registered independent who twice voted for Bush because of his tax policies. Voting for McCain, she says, would be a no-brainer if he had picked Sen. Joseph Lieberman as a running mate instead of Alaska's Gov. Palin. "I can't imagine sending Palin, with her cliches, et cetera, to negotiate or meet with leaders of other countries," she says.
Obama has struggled to capture older white voters, and Bolder epitomizes their hesitance about him. "He has pizazz, but he has a lot of plans to spend a lot of money," she says. "The health plan is more geared toward government control. He wants to raise capital gains taxes. Where is the money going to come from to pay for health care?"
Outside, the aqua aerobics class is full tilt with women in water wings dancing to Abba's "Mamma Mia" while golf carts are nosed up to the state-of-the-art gym. The computer room is packed. Bridge starts at 2. To write off this population as a monolithic voting bloc is a mistake: Ages here range from 55 (known as the "babies") to 95. They TiVo, they download, and most important, they are inveterate consumers of information.
By Anne Hull
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
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Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 43 Comments[Posted by downsteamjim at 07:27 PM : Oct 15, 2008]
you don''t need to go that far ... you and the rest that continue to support gwb are your own little cult ... and the amazing thing is ... you don''t seem to have any acknowledged awareness of it.
it''s well researched and documented ... and it''s called authoritarianism ... which makes you an authoritarian follower ... and those that you follow authoritarian leaders.
if you could actually think for yourself you would read up on it ... recognize that it''s describing you ... and want to change ... but you wont.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
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Posted by downsteamjim at 07:37 PM
McCain!
There is no voter fraud except the one the repos are trying by keeping people from voting if they are facing foreclosure. I''m sure you''ve heard. Mickey Mouse won''t be showing up, regardless of what lazy worker registered him.
You can''t get anything out of Republican FILTH that isn''t a bald faced lie.....
Obama may not get the gray vote, but he has the dead vote locked up.
Posted by downsteamjim at 07:03 PM : Oct
Frontline had excellent program last night, portraying both candidates in a non-partisan manner. You can see it on the PBS website.
Those old hippies will save America once again...
[Posted by BO_SBD at 05:26 PM : Oct 15, 2008]
no ... but i can name one the spent it''s way into one.
which party is the one that doesn''t understand the concept of a balanced budget ... which party is mostly responsible for the $10 trillion national debt ... which party gives money back to the wealthiest on the hope they''ll create jobs for the rest ... which party nearly doubled the national debt in less than six years?
taxes are the revenue that counter the expenditures ... it''s not really that difficult to follow.
Posted by BO_SBD at 05:45 PM : Oct 15, 2008
"George, stop posting and help me pack, before they throw out stuff on the lawn!" (Listen to Laura, BO, or you''re not gettin "any" tonight...)
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See all 43 Comments