LOS ANGELES -- "This is my tranquillity," said Jose Valles. "Sitting here waiting for the bus. Because most of the time I am stressed. Why? I will tell you. Because I don't have enough money."

Mr. Valles earns his living serving hamburgers at a McDonald's restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. He's a family man. He and his wife, Lily, have two children, a boy, 9, and a girl, 6. He talked about his family's circumstances while waiting in the hot sun last Thursday afternoon for the No. 60 bus at the corner of Seventh and Alameda Streets.

"It's hard. It's rough," he said. "You don't have the nice kiss on the cheek or the 'Hello, honey, how are you?' when you come home from work. It's 'What the hell are we gonna do?'

"I make $5.75 an hour. That's about $240 a week. One hundred ninety dollars after taxes. You can't really live on that. Lily works in a fast-food place, too. She makes the same as me. Two weeks of my pay and two weeks of her pay every month goes for rent. Then you have to pay the fare to go back and forth to work. You gotta pay for your food. You have bills. We're still paying on the sofa.

"You see, it's stressing me out just thinking about it."

I asked Mr. Valles what he and his family did for recreation.

"We take the kids to the park."

I asked if they ever went on vacation. He looked at me as if I'd asked if his children could fly. "No," said Mr. Valles quietly. "There is no money for vacation."

The Valleses are among the millions of working families Vice President Al Gore is trying to connect with as he travels the country promising to fight for "those who need a champion, those who need to be lifted up so they are never left behind."

The Republicans have denounced this effort to reach out to working families -- to build, as Mr. Gore says, a "better, fairer, more prosperous America" -- as divisive. It's dangerous, we're told. Un-American.

Mr. Gore is "a candidate who wants to wage class warfare to get ahead," said George W. Bush.

Welcome to the intersection of greed and paranoia. We may be enjoying good times, but the wealthy are not yet wealthy enough -- at least in the view of the G.O.P. -- to accede to a little bit of help for the likes of Jose Valles and his family.

With Mr. Bush already gift-wrapping most of the nation's projected surplus, which he intends to hand over to the very wealthiest among us, it's fair to ask who's waging war on whom.

In our conversation last week, Mr. Valles mentioned politics just once. "The politicians keep saying they are going to raise the minimum wage, but nothing happens," he said. "A minimum wage increase would help everybody, not just me."

Class warfare? Let's see. The Democrats have been trying without success to raise the minimum wage -- now $5.15 an hour -- by a mere $1 over the next two years. That's a whopping 50 cents an hour the first year, and another 50 cents the year after. My goodness, is that an attack on the rich? Is that what they mean by class warfare?

The Republicans in Congress have stood in the way of this most modest of pay hikes for the nation's low-wage workers. Mr. Gore favors the increase and says he'll fight for it. If that's class warfare, we need more of it.

Mr. Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney, is getting a retirement package worth an estimated $20 million from the Halliburton Company, an energy services outfit that has a big financial stake in the policies of the federal government. No problem, said Mr. Bush.

But a tiny boost in the minuscule minimum wage would seem to be a different story.

(The radical Texas Republican Party, at its convention in Houston in June, declared that all minimum wage laws should be repealed.)

I asked Jose Valles how his life would change if he earned a few more dollars a week. He said: "I would do something nice for Lily. I would buy some clothes for the children and try to take them to a movie every now and then. My dream is to someday be able to invest in a house."

He added: "I'll tell you the truth. I would like for my kids to go to college, which I was never able to do. I'm like all parents. I would like the best for my children. I would like my children to soar."

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

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