Voters show darker mood than in 2000

Issues shift
The issues have also shifted. Of the top eight political concerns found in a CBS News/New York Times poll this month, only three were on the list eight years ago. Terrorism, immigration , the environment and fuel prices did not register a blip back then. (The other top concern identified in recent polling was the Iraq war.)

In the 2000 campaign, it was possible for Mr. Bush to deride Mr. Gore’s environmentalism to considerable effect. Eight years later, Mr. Gore is a Nobel laureate, and coiled light bulbs and hybrid cars are status symbols.

“Before, I didn’t feel personally guilty if I left a light on,” said Meg Campbell, director of a charter high school in Dorchester, a working-class neighborhood in Boston. “It just wasn’t in the drinking water back then. Now it’s almost a religion.”

Since the campaign of 2000, the United States has lost 4,400 men and women in wars overseas, and nearly 3,000 people in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Hispanics have become the country’s largest minority, accounting for nearly half of annual population growth. Gasoline prices have doubled, and the home foreclosure rate has increased by 55 percent.

The proportion of Americans without health insurance, which was declining at decade’s end, has grown by 2 percentage points. Both the unemployment and poverty rates are a percentage point higher. War spending has helped convert a $236 billion federal budget surplus into a $163 billion deficit (reduced from $413 billion in 2004).

Reversal of the American dream
Some of those interviewed, like Raymond E. Dixon, a Kansas City computer programmer, said they were confident their children would not enjoy the same standard of living they had, calling it a reversal of the American dream. Several said the force of such rapid change, reinforced by the foreboding symbolism of airport security lines and orange alerts, had left the country gimlet-eyed, and wary.

“There was something out there we got blindsided by,” said Emily Kemp, a 30-year-old investment worker in Boston who was an Army officer until 2004. “At least now we know, and we are actively attempting to thwart that threat.”

Certainly, some Americans remain bullish. Charles K. Spencer, a 71-year-old investment adviser who lives in the Kansas City suburbs, said he was “unabashedly optimistic” about the future facing his four grandchildren. Technology and the free market will provide them with unlimited opportunity, Mr. Spencer said, so long as they are willing to relocate and retrain.

But the more common theme, that of innocence lost, was voiced by Erwin L. Epple, 54, and his wife, Fumiyo, 64, who were in Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, and saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon. “We said that day that our grandchildren will grow up in a different world, assuming the worst about people instead of the best,” said Mr. Epple, who owns a pizza franchise in Knoxville, Tenn.

Many of those interviewed remembered the emphasis placed in the 2000 campaign on restoring personal integrity to the Oval Office. Several volunteered that the focus of the current campaign should be on the rectitude of the country’s role in the world.

“In 2000,” said Philip R. Dupont, a Kansas City lawyer, “one of Bush’s big platforms was that he’d restore honesty and integrity to the White House. Then he went out and attacked a sovereign nation that had done nothing to us.”

As issues like health care, climate change and immigration have become more urgent, Americans seem less willing to dismiss failures of government and political polarization as business as usual. It feels more personal to them now, and they are demanding results.

Mr. Epple boiled with frustration as he vowed to vote for the candidate who convinces him that he or she is most able to solve problems. “I’m sick and tired of the party line and the platitudes,” he said. “I’m hearing hope. I’m hearing trust. But I’m not hearing solutions.”

Reporting was contributed by Randal C. Archibold in Los Angeles, Abby Goodnough in Boston, Kirk Johnson in Denver and Sam Roberts and Megan Thee in New York.

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