O’Connor Runs Against Image Coined by Her Opponents

Six o’clock on a chilly morning outside a plant gate is perhaps not the first place one would expect to find someone who has been called, among other things, “aloof,” “inaccessible” and “elitist.” Yet that is where San Diego mayoral candidate Maureen O’Connor was last week, shaking hands with General Dynamics workers at an hour when most of her opponents probably were still sleeping.

On other days, O’Connor, more so than any other mayoral candidate, has spent long hours at shopping centers and walking in neighborhoods, or chatting with small groups of voters at homes throughout the city. And, through it all, the former councilwoman who hopes to be the city’s first woman mayor is working hard to exorcise a demon from campaigns past and striving as much to show voters what she is not as what she is.

“One thing I’m not is aloof,” O’Connor said emphatically. “That’s an image created by my opponents and their consultants. That’s what consultants get paid to do--find negative things to say about their opponents. But that aloofness thing isn’t true, and I think the kind of campaign I’m running shows that it’s not true.”

True or not, that image of aloofness looms as an obstacle nearly as formidable to O’Connor as the 12 other candidates in the Feb. 25 mayoral primary--an election in which many groups, especially minorities, that gained entry to City Hall under former Mayor Roger Hedgecock are looking to O’Connor and the other would-be mayors for assurances of continued accessibility.

“People realize you’re not always going to agree with them, but they want to be sure--and they have a right to expect--that they can at least reach and talk to their public officials,” the former two-term Democratic San Diego city councilwoman said. “So, sure, I’m concerned that people might get a wrong impression from the things my opponents say. Unfortunately, it’s easier to create an image than it is to change one. All I can do is to try to show people the real Maureen.”

Whether voters have been seeing the “real Maureen” in this campaign or a crafty Populist image of her own design is a question that prompts widely divergent responses. What is undeniable, however, is that O’Connor’s 1986 strategy, founded on a return to her personal and political roots, is as risky as it is different from that of her unsuccessful 1983 mayoral race.

Three years after she spent more than $560,000 of her own money and was accused of trying to buy the mayor’s office, O’Connor has imposed a $150,000 spending limit on her primary campaign--less than the amount spent in many council races and about $100,000 below Republican Bill Cleator’s campaign budget. Overall, O’Connor spent $780,000 on her 1983 race, in which she narrowly lost to Hedgecock, 52% to 48%.

As a result of what she calls her “bold experiment . . . to end the craziness” of spiraling campaign costs, O’Connor has been outspent on radio and television ads by both Councilman Cleator and the other leading candidate in the race, former Councilman Floyd Morrow--a disadvantage offset by the fact that she entered the campaign as the candidate with the highest name recognition. To date, she has not spent any of her personal money in the race but has refused to rule out that possibility.

To compensate for the drastic spending reduction, she has returned to the grass-roots style of politicking that in 1971 allowed O’Connor, then a 25-year-old physical education teacher at a Catholic high school for girls, to become the youngest person ever elected to the San Diego City Council--a long-shot victory that one local newspaper labeled “the biggest political upset in 10 years.”

“In a different way, this race is as big a gamble as that race was,” O’Connor said. “Then, the experts didn’t think I could do it, period. Now, they’re saying that you can’t run a citywide race like mine in 1986, that you can’t reach enough people unless you have a big media campaign. Well, in about two weeks, we’ll know who was right.”

Known as a feisty advocate for the underdog during her two council terms, O’Connor already has devoted 24 days--three in each of the city’s eight council districts--to what she calls “person-to-person, one-on-one campaigning” at shopping centers, supermarkets, factories and residences. If elected, she has pledged to spend every other Saturday at City Hall meeting constituents on a “first-come, first-served” basis, and says that she would spend at least one day per month visiting neighborhoods throughout the city.

“That’s why all this talk about aloofness is a joke--I’m spending more time out on the streets, talking to the public, than any other candidate,” O’Connor said.

Ironically, much of the criticism of O’Connor comes, not from Republicans, but from members of her own party. Some Democratic officeholders, as well as party officials and other activists, complain that O’Connor has been remote and inaccessible in the past, bristling in particular over the recollections of unreturned telephone calls. Angered by his consistent inability to contact O’Connor, one Democrat once programmed his phone’s automatic dialing device so that it repeatedly rang O’Connor’s home number.

Her critics also charge that O’Connor has provided little financial help and public support--or, at least, less than they apparently expect from the wife of a multimillionaire businessman--to the local Democratic Party and its candidates. O’Connor’s husband is Robert O. Peterson, a founder of the Jack in the Box fast-food chain.

“There aren’t a lot of (Democrats) that feel close to Maureen,” former county Democratic Party Chairman Phil Connor said last month in endorsing Cleator. If O’Connor is elected, Connor warned, she would be a “divisive, reclusive mayor.”

“The criticism you always hear about Maureen is that she’s invisible between elections,” added former Councilman Jess Haro. “It’s like, ‘Here I am running again and I want your support.’ But people in the party and the community want to know, ‘Where have you been lately?’ ”

Others contend that in recent years, O’Connor has increasingly surrounded herself with her family and a handful of friends, seldom reaching outside that tight circle for advice. In particular, her close friendship with Helen Copley, publisher of the San Diego Union and Tribune, arouses suspicion, notably from some of O’Connor’s supporters in minority communities. Her political opponents also charge that the friendship has produced favorable news coverage for O’Connor over the years--a claim that O’Connor vigorously disputes.

“Mrs. Copley and I are very good friends, but when I’m running for office, she stays neutral,” O’Connor said. “We bend over backwards to be respectful of each other’s arenas.”

In her defense, O’Connor’s friends argue that her basic shyness can sometimes be mistaken for aloofness and attribute some of the criticism she receives to simple jealousy over the wealth that followed her 1977 marriage to Peterson. Peterson filed for divorce last year, but the couple has since reconciled.

In a financial disclosure statement filed last month, O’Connor disclosed real-estate holdings, stocks, partnerships and other investments totaling more than $3 million. O’Connor and Peterson have disposed of several investments that were cited as posing possible conflicts of interest during the 1983 campaign, including an interest in the U.S. Grant Hotel, a TraveLodge adjacent to the San Diego Trolley line and property adjoining Balboa Park.

Many of O’Connor’s former colleagues on the various public agencies on which she has served describe her as a warm, personable individual who gets along well with her associates.

“I think Maureen’s gotten a bum rap,” said Louis Wolfsheimer, a San Diego Unified Port District commissioner and a Cleator supporter. “You can call her a lot of things, but aloof isn’t one of them. She’s truly a person of the people.”

Calling herself “a very family-oriented person and private person,” O’Connor said, “That’s not something I feel I have to apologize for or that makes me less effective as a public official.”

While defensive about the criticism, O’Connor sometimes jokes about the subject, saying, “When you come from a family as large as mine, it’s hard to be too aloof about anything.”

Indeed, any attempt to understand O’Connor or what motivates her must begin with her Irish-Catholic family. O’Connor and her twin sister, Mavourneen, were born July 14, 1946, at Mercy Hospital, the seventh and eighth of 13 children--Maureen was eighth--of Jerome and Frances O’Connor, whose family was featured on the cover of Parade magazine on Mother’s Day in 1956. Twelve of the children are still alive, and all but one reside in San Diego.

The O’Connors lived in Southeast San Diego when the twins were born, but later moved to North Park and then to Mission Hills, when the twins were about 6 years old.

A one-time boxer, Jerome O’Connor ran a combination convenience-liquor store that provided barely enough money for what Maureen O’Connor terms “a pretty no-frills life.” One Thanksgiving, for example, the family could not afford a turkey, so one of O’Connor’s six brothers molded hamburger in the shape of one.

Taught by their father, the seven O’Connor sisters became excellent precision and rough-water swimmers, winning more than 1,000 individual and team medals and trophies. In 1964, the “Swimming O’Connor Sisters” were part of a nationwide traveling show called “The Wonderful World of Sport.”

Frances O’Connor, a nurse, also introduced her children to community service by having them teach patients with multiple sclerosis how to swim.

The lessons that she learned while growing up in a large family helped shape her concern for the disadvantaged and an abiding desire for public service, O’Connor says.

“At a very young age, you had a sense of being responsible for someone other than yourself, of working for the good of the group,” O’Connor said. “Public service is a natural outgrowth of that.”

After graduating from Rosary High School, O’Connor worked her way through San Diego State University in the late 1960s with odd jobs that included being a store cashier, bank teller, telephone operator and a city recreation program swimming instructor. In 1970, she received a special bachelor of arts degree in psychology, sociology and recreation, and returned to Rosary High School to teach physical education.

O’Connor’s entry into politics--a subject in which she then had only passing interest--occurred in 1971, the result of her anger over being ignored when she went to City Hall to complain about how, in her view, a troupe of Mexican Indians who participated in San Diego’s bicentennial celebration were being poorly paid and shabbily treated.

Exasperated by that experience, O’Connor launched what appeared at the time to be a rather quixotic campaign for an open council seat to register her dissatisfaction with City Hall.

Written off as a hopeless long shot by the political “experts,” O’Connor capitalized on her anonymity by quietly building an army of about 700 volunteers, many of them Rosary students.

Backed by the “Maureen Corps,” O’Connor transformed her campaign slogan--”Expect a Miracle”--into reality by finishing second in a four-candidate primary and then defeating businessman Lou Ridgeway in the November general election, 93,185 votes to 84,639. Four years later, she won reelection by again defeating Ridgeway, though by a narrower margin--61,187 votes to 58,019.

Allied With Wilson

O’Connor and three other Democrats on the council in the early 1970s usually gave Republican Mayor Pete Wilson, who also was elected in 1971, the votes that he needed to enact most of his major programs, including a tough law limiting campaign contributions--the law that Hedgecock was convicted of violating--and a growth-management plan aimed at focusing growth in already-developed areas of the city.

“I don’t view local government in partisan terms,” O’Connor said. “Potholes don’t have party labels.”

Many of O’Connor’s most notable achievements on the City Council involved the creation of programs aimed at helping the poor and senior citizens. She sponsored legislation that established a senior meals program, reduced senior fares on public transit, allowed senior citizens to use city recreation facilities for free, and permitted them to work for the city beyond the age of 65.

O’Connor also helped create the city’s paramedic program, was instrumental in developing a low-cost housing program under which city land was leased to developers at reduced rates, and helped initiate various crime prevention programs.

“Maureen looks to government as the solution to more problems than I do, but I give her credit for recognizing that there are price tags attached to a lot of these social programs,” said former Councilman Fred Schnaubelt. “In fact, at times, she was more tight-fisted than some so-called conservatives. While conservatives sometimes find it hard to say no because they’re afraid of looking insensitive, Maureen, because she was more liberal, had no trouble telling people, ‘Look, I’ve supported these causes, but the money just isn’t there.’ ”

Skillful Negotiator

Her former council colleagues also praise O’Connor’s political connections and skills as a back-room negotiator.

“If Maureen was on your side, that meant that you probably could count on another two or three votes, too,” Haro said. “She was excellent at building coalitions.”

During her final few years on the council, O’Connor was frequently criticized for her high absenteeism. Figures compiled by the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, which monitors council attendance, show that O’Connor missed 27% of the council votes in 1978 and 38% in 1979--a factor that contributed to the genesis of her image of aloofness. Some of her missed votes, however, occurred when O’Connor was representing the city at other public agency meetings.

Adhering to a campaign pledge to limit herself to two terms, O’Connor retired from the council in 1979. She remained in public service, however, when the council appointed her as one of the city’s three representatives on the Port Commission.

O’Connor also served from 1978 to 1983 on the Metropolitan Transit Development Board, where she led the fight for development of the San Diego Trolley--the accomplishment for which she is perhaps best known.

Wilson and other civic and political leaders initially were skeptical about the trolley, largely because of concerns about its cost. O’Connor, however, removed a major stumbling block when she negotiated the right-of-way agreement for the railroad tracks from the Southern Pacific Transportation Co. for $18.1 million--far less than many estimated the city would have to pay.

Hedgecock Attacked Wealth

Some of the same criticisms directed at O’Connor this year also were heard in the 1983 mayoral race, as Hedgecock and her other opponents gave the charge of aloofness wide circulation. Hedgecock also made a major issue of O’Connor’s personal wealth, calling her husband “Daddy Big Bucks” and often referring to O’Connor as “a spoiled little rich girl.”

O’Connor concedes that those personal attacks temporarily soured her on politics and influenced her decision not to challenge Hedgecock in 1984, as the allegations about improprieties in the financing of the mayor’s 1983 race were unfolding.

“For me, the attacks on my family were the worst thing about that race, and I didn’t want it to happen again,” O’Connor said. “There are some things I’m not willing to do just to call myself mayor, and attacking my opponents and their families is one of the biggest.”

While critics charge that O’Connor has been largely reclusive since her 1983 loss, she gained considerable visibility throughout 1984 when she took a leading role in opposition to the rising cost of the proposed bayfront convention center. Saying that she was skeptical “from the start” of the $95-million construction figure presented to voters in November, 1983, O’Connor often reminds campaign audiences that the estimated cost now has risen to about $125 million, and predicts that the final figure will be even higher.

“If I wanted to, I could say, ‘I told you so,’ ” O’Connor said. Her dogged opposition, however, angered council members who were eager to see the convention center project move ahead, and she was not reappointed to the Port Commission when her term expired last year.

O’Connor, however, is proud of her loyal opposition role on the convention center and often stresses it in her campaign stops. At one recent coffee in Kensington, O’Connor told several dozen voters that her skepticism about the facility’s cost demonstrates that she knows “the questions that have to be asked to cut the budget and make our tax dollars go farther.”

‘I’m Most Qualified’

“There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m the most qualified candidate for the job,” O’Connor said. “My resume is such that, if you were to look at it side by side with the others, strictly in an interview basis, I probably would be the mayor. I’ve been involved in just about every major issue in this city for the past 15 years. I could just walk into the office and start doing the job from Day One.”

However, if she again falls short of that goal, O’Connor said, “It wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

“I’m a little more philosophical than I was three years ago, and I think I can put things in perspective better,” she said. “Once you’ve crossed the river once in the sense of losing something you wanted very much in life, you learn how to handle it.

“Still, I want the job as much as anybody else. If I was really aloof, I wouldn’t even be in this race. I could travel a lot and live a very enjoyable personal life. But I’d rather spend my time at City Hall. I think that’s proof of my commitment.”