DESPERATELY SEEKING LORI

By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY/SHREWSBURY

Swing voters hold a nation's secrets. Sometimes they are important because of what they tell us about an election. But when the race isn't even close, they are important because of what they tell us about ourselves.

Thirty years ago, the crucial voter was a white, male factory worker--urban, ethnic, patriotic--who ripened into a Reagan Democrat and started swinging the White House to the G.O.P. But in 1996 the archetype has changed: she is a suburban, conservative, Midwestern working mother, 35 years old, earns her age, finished high school, maybe some college. Between 1992 and 1996 she has swung more dramatically than any other voter; 20% of this group voted for Clinton last time; he's pulling 52% now.

And yet the lives of the voters who are deciding this race can't be read in the numbers. In some ways it matters less how much they earn than how many kids they have, less how they voted in the past than how they feel about the future, less where they live than how they manage.

In the morning they strap the baby into the high chair with a handful of Cheerios on the tray, then stay alert for the sound of his choking while they take a two-minute shower. They consider a week at their in-laws' a vacation and joke that they live at the Target store. They drive a big car not because they haul a lot of lumber but because it gives them a fleeting sense of control. Everything changes when they become parents--when life gets both richer and harder, and everything becomes a trade-off, and the self is no longer the center, and the future is no longer possible to ignore.

The campaigns are tracking this voter so closely that they can measure the "persuadability" of her neighborhood, block by treelined block. Millions have already been spent hunting for her, with an intensity matched only by her immunity to the whole effort. Campaign consultants are stalking her, the conventions were staged for her, the speeches scripted for her, the ads aimed right at her. And because she is so different from the swing voter who shaped this nation for a generation, she has miniaturized its politics into a kitchen-table bargaining session over what it might take to help her get through the day.

From there, the candidates draft the playbooks. Clinton signs a bill guaranteeing new mothers 48 hours in the hospital, one last chance to catch her breath, a last night's sleep, courtesy of the President of the United States. It's hard to find any money to put away for college, so Dole offers a deduction for student loans and a $500 tax credit per child. Mom can't be there screening what the kids watch on TV every minute, so here's a V chip. It is not the craft of politics, it's the art of coping.

To trace this political transformation, TIME set out to find a woman who could tell the story of this election by telling the story of her life. Lori Lucas lives in Shrewsbury, Missouri, an undecided voter in a bellwether town in the ultimate swing state. She is not just an archetype; she's a revelation, a spirited wreck of political contradiction. She's an unmarried mom who thinks the country is on the wrong track because the family unit has broken down. She drives a gas-guzzling station wagon because it's safe but worries so much about the environment that she collects cans at work to recycle at home and uses the same plastic-foam Diet Pepsi cup for a week. She doesn't believe in God, but believes in the Ten Commandments because "I know they're the right thing to do." And while she doesn't have time for newspapers or TV network news, she intends to do what she always does before presidential elections: head to the local library two weeks before the vote. "I pull out two weeks of newspapers and read about the issues," she says. "But I probably won't make a decision until I'm in the voting booth."

Her politics are complicated, but her dreams are not. "What I think about is my baby being safe when he is grown up. I don't want him to have to fight in a war. I don't want there to be a depression. I don't want us to be without money." She is not in control of her life, but she is in control of this election.

"The single most important thing that has changed the lives of these women is the birth of a child." --Mark Penn, Clinton's pollster

Lori is in the kitchen cooking dinner: chicken baked in mushroom soup and soy sauce, and fresh broccoli. At all costs, she will find a way for her little family to eat meals together, to glue their life in place. She has a wide-open face, with eager eyes, a tangy huskiness in her voice and a fast, shy smile. She is 35, but for as far back as she can remember, people have called her kid.

Lori bought her house in Shrewsbury five years ago, and is slowly replacing all the old single-pane windows. The hilly neighborhood has a virtually all-white population of about 7,000, with an average household income of $52,537. Lori's is a street of $79,000 starter homes that people stay in for 30 years, brick bungalows with metal awnings and a ribbon of lawn that skips from house to house. For years the mainline Forest Park patriarchs of St. Louis looked down on the German immigrants who settled this south side because they were forever washing those neat cement porches and tight little windows. They called them the Scrubby Dutch. Policeman Harvey Laux lives across the street from Lori. He figures there has been one burglary in the 17 years he has lived here.

Sam is in his high chair, eating whatever pasta he is not wearing. Sam's dad Mike, 30, is out shopping for tomorrow night's dinner. He and Lori had been dating for three years before he moved in, when Lori got pregnant. When the baby was born last September, they named him after Sam Malone, Mike's favorite character on Cheers. Lori's heart hasn't been the same since. Neither has her life. "I used to be a list maker," she says, and then she smiles at herself. "And now I don't even have time to make lists."

Her family is tighter, her friendships looser than ever before. Her idea of leisure is a nap on Saturday afternoon. She stopped getting the St. Louis Post-Dispatch--she subscribed mainly for the coupons and TV listings--because "Sam would get the ink all over him if we had the paper here." The news in general, and the presidential campaign in particular, is barely background noise. She voted for Bush in 1988 because her father did, but everything about her life has become more independent since then. She voted for Ross Perot in 1992 because he seemed as detached from politics as she was. Now she's completely undecided, more available to Clinton than to Dole, but there has been no time to dwell on a decision that she thinks will have so little effect on her. She doesn't need a pollster to tell her that this is her own personal paradigm shift. "I used to have total control over my life," she says. "Some nights I could scream and cry and have a nervous breakdown."

She was 33 when Sam was conceived. "I was happy and amazed that it happened." He was not really planned, since she and Mike weren't married, not really intending to marry, though they now plan to. Like just about everything else in her life, marriage is on her running, imaginary to-do list, somewhere after spending about $600 next week on a new toilet and towel racks for the bathroom, and before seeing Stonehenge. But this time, after two failed marriages, she wants to do it right.

"I never had a nice wedding. The first time I wore Mom's dress. I was a dumb kid; I just wanted to get out of the house. The second time I fell crazy in love. We lived together for a few years, got married when I was 25, divorced at 30." He drank too much, she says, and he couldn't have children. "That wasn't the reason we split--but it was a reason not to work at the marriage anymore." Her father used to tell her that the only reason to get married was to have a family. "Now for once I'm not married, and I have a happy family."

Sam is helping her unload the dishwasher, which means most of the knives and forks wind up on the floor. She has been thinking about change. "The week before Sam was born, I washed every piece of clothing there was, including what I was wearing," she recalls. "That was the last time the laundry was caught up."

"They'd love to have more time to spend with their families. More time to teach them the values they don't think they get at day care. No matter how well you pick the day-care center, you're still not there." --Tony Fabrizio, Dole's pollster

"Just getting out of the house in the mornings--it's terrible." Some days Lori wakes up and thinks of what is coming and suspects it may not turn out to be such a great day. Those are the mornings she really needs her shower, not to get clean but to get psyched for the day. "Because sometimes it seems like everyone else's mood kind of depends on mine. If you're in a foul mood, you get the crabbiness right back. So when I wake up that way--well, it's a shower thing. It's the only time I really have to myself."

Just about every day begins with a quiet, dreaded question: whether Mike or Lori will drive Sam to Lori's mother's house for the day. She gets a knot in her stomach thinking about it, hoping to avoid a fight. Mike says he ends up doing it about half the time, though he complains about how much gas the 20-minute trip uses up. They rarely kiss each other goodbye in the morning. There's no time. Lori is usually out of the house by 7:30 and at work by 8. She skips breakfast but sips a Diet Pepsi and buys some peanut-butter crackers at Mr. Gas on the way.

Lori's mom Doris echoes what Dole tells women: they should work only if they want to, a 1950s notion that defies the economy of the 1990s. "If I had my choice, both of my daughters would stay home," says Doris. She reared her five children while her husband Ed worked for 27 years at Sears. But she realizes Lori has little choice, so she thought about what matters to her most, and then made a decision about her own life that makes all the difference in Lori's.

Five months before Sam was born, Lori went to the state bureau of child care in St. Louis and studied its records for several local day-care centers. She chose one just a few moments from her job, so she could slip over and nurse her baby at lunchtime. It cost $152 a week. Doris would go to the center in the afternoons and stay for hours. And very soon she had seen enough. "The room was too small and was crammed with cribs," she recalls. "The workers sneezed into their hands and then wouldn't wash them."

Before long, Doris had made up her mind. She would watch Sam during the day, while Lori worked, along with her daughter Barbara's children two days a week. "I knew it would make me tired," Doris says. "But what's more important than my grandson?" She won't take any money from her daughters, although she buys most of the grandchildren's clothes and has turned her tidy home into a day-care center.

Doris worries about everyone. She worries about her mother, 93 and suffering from Alzheimer's in a nursing home, whom she now has less time to visit; she worries about the stress in her children's lives. "I worry that Lori works so much. But I know she can't help it." What does Ed worry about? "I worry about Doris."

"You need to look at the positive forces in their lives, the great possibility there. Obviously they still have concerns, but more than anything, there are grounds for affirmation." --Don Baer, White House communications director

"Welcome to our midday family meal," Lori says, as she sits in her office at Rudivani Precision Motorworks, the car-repair shop she manages in Webster Groves. The two mechanics are eating take-out sandwiches; Lori is eating a hamburger and returning phone calls in her little office. Propped up in the corner is a framed poster called 21 Suggestions for Success. The top four: "Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery. Work at something you enjoy, and that's worthy of your time and talent. Give people more than they expect, and do it cheerfully. Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know." Her boss Rudi Cavataio found the poster at Target and couldn't resist, but Lori hasn't had time to hang it up yet. "Maybe sometime I'll succeed in getting that success sign up," she jokes.

Lori comes to work in clean white Reeboks, then changes into the greasy pair she keeps under her desk. She arrives early and stays late, managing the shop, working the phones, soothing the customers, ordering parts, keeping the books, making haircut appointments for the mechanics, test-driving all the cars. "She makes things happen," says Cavataio. "She's allowed the business to grow." Grow so fast, in fact, that they have been fighting the city to let them keep more cars on their cluttered lot than the city fathers would like. "I guess we didn't understand the politics of it all," Lori says.

But she does now. She and Cavataio are seeking a new conditional-use permit, a battle that constitutes her baptism in politics. She has been pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, getting petitions signed. She makes no distinction between Democrat and Republican meddling. "They have no right telling us how to run our business," she says. "The only way for us to keep the number of cars down is to turn customers away."

Lori grew up in a house with five sets of encyclopedias. She was an A student into her sophomore year in high school, thought she would go to college, maybe become a teacher, until she fell in with a fast crowd, smoked a lot of pot and let her grades fall. But she was always a hard worker. At 13 she lied about her age to get her first job, at the snack bar of the local swimming pool. After high school she worked as a bookkeeper at a car-parts store, but she was fired, she says, because she didn't dress up enough. There was a reason for that. When she did wear a skirt, the boss had a habit of trying to put his hands up under it.

She got a job at European Car Parts and spent 15 years there, starting at $5.25 an hour and eventually making $35,000 a year. But the job was boring, and the predominantly male shop didn't seem understanding about her pregnancy and how everything was different now. When she went back to work after Sam was born, she quickly jumped at Cavataio's offer to go to RPM, as long as he would match her salary. She started three weeks later, and has barely taken a lunch break since. "I care about what's going on here," she says. "I want it to be just right. I want everyone to be happy. I've always operated like it was my business."

"A male voter says, 'I'm getting taxed to death. I'm not making enough.' It's very cut and dried. With female voters, we hear, 'I'm working harder, but we're not getting ahead, and I don't have time to do everything I need to do.' Politics is much more contextual to a female voter than a male voter." --Fabrizio

Lori wheels her station wagon into a spot outside the Wal-Mart, a 20-minute drive from her home. She likes to go late at night, after Sam is asleep, for some solitude among the bargains. But on this Saturday morning she's there by 11, filling her cart with four winter shirts for her son, four ladies' shirts, baby wipes and formula, paper towels, a flea comb for her two cats, 136 diapers, and a box of graham crackers to occupy Sam, who's strapped happily into the front of the cart. The total comes to $146.13. "I thought," she says as she writes the check, "that it would be more."

Lori worries little about inflation; instead, she shops for speed. She rarely clips coupons, except for baby formula, and stops at a small grocery on her way home from work rather than go out of her way to a larger and slightly cheaper supermarket. "You have to walk half a mile just to get some onions," she says. "Time is so valuable to me now."

She feels she's losing ground by standing still. "I guess I'd say I'm lower middle class," she says, even though when Mike is doing well with his windows, doors and siding business, their household income can hit about $60,000. "I didn't feel that way four years ago before I had Sam, when I was making the same amount of money. I thought I was doing pretty damn good. Now it's nothing to get excited about." Lori keeps the household books. "I'm an incredible bill payer," she says, "but a terrible saver." Last week she called her mortgage officers to learn why her monthly house payment rose from $592 to $616, even though interest rates are falling; the answer was higher insurance fees and taxes. After that she socks away $150 every other month into a mutual fund, while trying to erase $14,000 in credit-card debt by next year. Bob Dole's 15% tax cut would help, but she doubts it will ever happen. "That's probably what I would say if I were running for President."

She believes less in politicians than in personal enterprise, even though her experience has been mixed at best. She and Mike have tried a few "get-rich-quick schemes," she says, selling a line of home products--water filters, shampoos, vitamins--to friends and relatives; signing up new customers for a long-distance telephone company; even investing $5,000 in a scheme to provide leasable race cars to weekend thrill seekers, which has so far produced only two takers. All these businesses have yielded more loss than profit.

Lori permits herself few luxuries, large or small. "It used to be important to slap on something feminine once in a while. But not anymore." Once a month or so, the couple will drop $35 on dinner for three at the Red Lobster. "I stopped in the store to get meat for dinner one night this week, and I bought a pint of Swiss chocolate milk for myself. I saw it on the shelf, and it looked so good. I drank it in the car and it spoiled my appetite, but it was great. It was sinful."

The drug ads? Those "are aimed right at her." --Fabrizio

"V chips, computers in classrooms, school uniforms. They are all about giving her control of the lives of her children." --Baer

Lori is sitting in the cafe at Schnucks Markets' 24-hour Super Center, talking about what scares her. Like the national debt. "It's in the trillions, right? I barely know how to write that number." Then there's Social Security, the issue that hits her each Friday when she does RPM's payroll. "Every week it gets taken out of my paycheck, and will I ever get it back? Then I do the books, and I see it deducted from the payroll, and I think, Someone else is using my money." Glancing across the restaurant to a pair of women in their 70s having coffee, she adds, "I wonder if there will be anything left for me. Sam certainly won't see a penny."

Lori has never been the victim of a crime; she doesn't even know anyone who has. But she still thinks about it a lot. She has been downtown only twice this year, and locks her doors when she drives across the city limits. Having a child of her own has turned Lori into a law-and-order hard-liner who believes in capital punishment and thinks prisons coddle criminals. But on abortion, Lori belongs to the church of the second chance. "I'm upside down and tossed on this one. People I love have had them. I can see why it's done for rape, incest and life endangerment of the woman. I'd never have one unless my life were in danger." She ends up landing right at the heart of America's silent consensus: she doesn't want abortion outlawed, but she doesn't want it easy. "Maybe the government should say that you can have one and only one abortion," she says. "But if you screw up and want to have one again, that's too bad."

Lori doesn't know whom she's going to vote for, but she does know she has trouble even remembering that Bob Dole is in the race. "It's like he's not even there," she says. "I have to force him to enter my mind." She knows a little of his story, admires his gritty recovery from his war injury, but is worried that he might not live out his term. "I want someone more contemporary."

Clinton's missteps don't much bother her--she doesn't care about Whitewater or his affairs, doesn't know who Dick Morris is--but the President's manner does. "I hate that Clinton said he didn't inhale." She likes Hillary Clinton and isn't keen on Newt Gingrich. "His name alone irritates me. I know that a newt is a lizard. We had them growing up. If you touch their tails, they break off as a defense mechanism, but then they grow back." Not that she's thrilled by her Congressman, Richard Gephardt, who would replace Gingrich as Speaker if the Democrats take over. "He's been around an awfully long time, but nothing seems to be any different."

Foreign policy doesn't interest her; the office manager thinks the country should be run by a CEO. But she isn't sold on Perot, and once again imagines the research she'd do. "I'd like to call one of his companies and speak to 10 of his employees and hear how they feel about him."

"The fact is, you could watch the presidential campaign and not see anything touch on most peoples' frustrations and concerns. Whatever politics or government means to them today, it's a fraction of what it was 20 to 30 years ago. It's less relevant, and they don't think it matters very much." --Pollster Bob Teeter

It's evening now, everyone's home, Sam's cold is better, the lights are coming on up and down the street. Lori's house is sheathed in olive-green steel siding; there's a Japanese maple squatting like a sumo wrestler out front, and a sweet gum tree, and a big red oak in the back shading the gas grill and the lawn chairs. The house is a home--a sweet, messy testament to the compromises of parenthood; the curtains are lace, the couches paisley, the walls papered in cream with pink roses and wreaths of dried flowers, all soft edges and tones that fade behind the yelping primary colors of Playskool and Fisher-Price.

The TV is on, the movie of the week with Tori Spelling, but the sound is muted. Lori's favorite show is ER; it's paced at about the same rate as her life. Sam doesn't watch much of anything other than Barney and auto racing. The clock ticks; the ceiling fan whumps. Mike has given Sam his bath; the baby arrives, damp and in mismatched pajamas, to snuggle. Lori says his hair smells like candy.

She is talking about government. "I guess I see it all as a bunch of red tape," she says. "I think if I got food stamps or something I would be grateful." She has to pause and think a long time to imagine anything government has done for her, any difference it has ever made in her life, anything politics or politicians could ever do for her. Then she gets it. "Maybe I'll be able to get an SBA loan someday, start my own business."

Sam cries when Lori slips outside to sit on the porch steps and have a cigarette and a glass of Tang. She won't smoke in front of him, but this is what counts as her down time, and it's a soft, cool, edge-of-autumn night full of wishing stars. The 1986 Ford Country Squire station wagon, gray-green with faux wood paneling, sits in the driveway. She bought it when she was pregnant. Some people build bookcases or drop $250 on a souped-up stroller. But this is the way a car girl nests. "I don't care what I drive as long as it's safe."

When she was young and began falling in love with cars, she could tell the make and model in the dark, just by the headlights. She and her friends chased the cars around the neighborhood, played tag and kick the can. "Those were the days. Life was good and easy then," she says. And she laughs to herself. "It's still pretty good. It's just not easy."

--With reporting by Wendy Cole/Shrewsbury

With reporting by WENDY COLE/SHREWSBURY