Her economic worries transcend politics of the moment. She ticks them off: "The long shift that we've had with the globalizing world, going from a manufacturing to a service economy. From a service economy to just a consumer economy, period, that buys more than it produces. And everybody having a job that can be done by a human being, but it's just more cost-effective to do it with a computer.
"All of those factors float around my head and keep me up some nights," she said. "The economy is (in) an incredible state of transition that we've never seen before. And nobody has any idea what it's going to look like. When the smoke clears, what are we going to be living in? And nobody seems to have an answer to that. Nobody knows. All you can do is put on a couple of Band-Aids here and try something there, and see what happens. And that makes me nervous."
If the recession played no favorites among the rich, the poor and those in between, the recovery did. Lost jobs and homes may not have come back but the stock market did, favoring those whose wealth resided in investments.
Carol Clemens, a 66-year-old retiree from Edmond, Okla., and member of the local chapter of an investing club, put money into Ford shares near the bottom of the market in 2009, sold some and has seen the value of the rest grow fivefold. That eased her rough patch. "In short, we're not better off than we were in 2007, but neither are we destitute, for which we give thanks," she said. She's leaning toward Romney.
But investments and politics ebb and flow. Of more concern is the nation's future. She's the mother of grown children who "are not as conscious of saving as we were at their ages," and of grandchildren who are entering higher education. She laments class divisions played up in the campaign — the stigmatization of the poor, the dissing of the rich — and thinks the country needs a deeper fix than any one leader can achieve.
"Americans have got to start taking full responsibility for our messes," she said. "We vote in ineffective politicians, we tolerate second-rate educational systems, we envy those who have worked to have more and resent those who burden our social services because they have great needs.
"I would hope that the next president would have the guts to call us on our blindness and narrow visions," said Clemens. "We have to regain our ability to stop, consider and give a damn if we are going to change things."
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Woodward reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Michael Rubinkam, Dave Carpenter in Chicago, Matt Sedensky in West Palm Beach, Fla., Michael Sandler in Richmond, Va., Tom Krisher and Dee-Ann Durbin in Detroit, Alex Veiga in Los Angeles, Matthew Brown in Billings, Mont., Jeannie Nuss in Little Rock, Ark., and Mark Jewell in Boston contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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