O’Connor, Cleator Camps Put Campaigning on Hold

It’s 10 weeks before the San Diego mayoral election. Do you know where your candidates are? Do you care?

“Right now, most people probably don’t,” San Diego City Councilman Bill Cleator, a mayoral finalist, said, chuckling. “It’s not a very hot topic today.”

“I think the public’s glad to have a little breather,” added former Councilwoman Maureen O’Connor, Cleator’s opponent in the June 3 runoff. “But, hey, this is San Diego! The sun’s shining, Easter’s coming, and the election is still a couple of months off. People aren’t ready to focus on the race yet. They’ll put it off for as long as they can. That’s why things have been pretty quiet.”

Quiet, indeed. Since the Feb. 25 primary in which O’Connor narrowly missed outright election, the mayoral race has been in a kind of suspended animation, with both candidates maintaining a relatively low public profile while quietly plotting strategy and raising money. With the notable exception of Cleator’s hiring of a new campaign manager, the race this past month has essentially been the political equivalent of treading water.

“You can use whatever cliche you want--the lull before the storm, the quiet before the battle,” Cleator spokesman Don Harrison said. “That’s what’s happening, or isn’t happening.”

“It’s kind of like the Phony War,” added a former aide to ex-Mayor Roger Hedgecock, whose resignation in the wake of his 13-count felony conviction prompted the special race to fill the remaining 2 1/2 years in his term.

The dearth of visible activity in the campaign in recent weeks stems from the belief of the candidates and their aides that public interest in the runoff--the sixth time that San Diegans will have voted for a mayor in the past three years--is at a low ebb. The weather, the approaching income-tax filing deadline, colleges’ spring break, the Padres’ spring training--those subjects and myriad others easily overshadow the mayoral contest in the public consciousness, the candidates admit.

“I don’t detect any great public clamor to hear more from the candidates at this point,” Harrison added. “People have just gone through one election. They know they have to vote again. But they’re not in any great hurry to get started. It’s sort of a, ‘Yeah, yeah, talk to me later’ type thing.”

Similarly, O’Connor says that a common response during her telephone solicitations for campaign donations is, “Call me back after tax time.”

“There’s a feeling that it’s still a little early,” O’Connor said. “There’s not a great deal of urgency about the mayor’s race at this point.”

That opinion, a consensus in both the O’Connor and Cleator camps, leads both candidates to the rather pragmatic conclusion that if almost no one’s paying attention, it makes no sense to waste time or resources trying, in the words of Cleator consultant Ken Rietz, “to force feed . . . the campaign” to voters during this lull.

“Even under the best of circumstances, it’s difficult for political candidates to capture the public’s attention,” said Dick Sykes, O’Connor’s campaign consultant. “Most people don’t tend to think about an election until it’s upon them. That’s why so much (politicking) is crammed into the final few weeks.”

For appearances’ sake, if nothing else, the candidates are reluctant to admit that their pace has slowed; they emphasize that they have made a handful of public appearances since the primary. O’Connor, for example, drew on her Irish Catholic roots in making the rounds of bars on St. Patrick’s Day for what she called “a lot of fun and a little politics.” And although most of the campaign’s major forums will not begin until mid-April, both candidates recently have talked to groups such as the Sierra Club and the local AFL-CIO.

Undeniably, however, the campaign has basically been on automatic pilot for the past month while the two mayoral rivals and their top aides concentrate on what O’Connor terms “the nuts-and-bolts grunt work” that will lay the groundwork for the remainder of the campaign.

The temporary absence of major day-to-day pressures in the campaign has given strategists in both the O’Connor and Cleator camps more time to comb each other’s records and actions during the primary for possible weaknesses or issues that could be exploited during the runoff, as well as to seek ways to shore up their own potential liabilities.

“I’m sure they’re going to come after me and try to make Maureen the issue,” said O’Connor, considered a heavy favorite in the runoff because of her 46%-30% edge over Cleator in the primary. “We have to be ready for that.”

As part of that preparedness, O’Connor’s aides have been strengthening her precinct organization and already are plotting her get-out-the-vote plans, particularly for traditionally low voter turnout areas in minority communities where much of O’Connor’s support is based.

“We want to have our people in place in the neighborhoods so that when the attacks start flying later, we can counteract them,” O’Connor said.

Under the direction of new campaign manager Dan Greenblat, Cleator’s campaign also is seeking to bolster his precinct organization. Greenblat, the former administrative aide to Rep. Bill Lowery (R-San Diego) and regarded as one of San Diego’s top political strategists, has acknowledged that Cleator failed to meet “minimum vote goals” even in some traditional Republican strongholds in North San Diego.

In addition, O’Connor, sensitive about lingering criticism over the fact that she spent more than $560,000 of her own money in her unsuccessful 1983 mayoral race against Hedgecock, has produced a somewhat convoluted analysis that purports to show that she and Cleator have spent about the same overall amount in their past council and mayoral campaigns. That analysis, however, glosses over the fact that some of those campaigns were conducted eight years apart under vastly different circumstances, and also excludes more than $500,000 that O’Connor spent in the 1983 mayoral runoff--because, she notes, Cleator was not a candidate in that race.

Regardless, O’Connor hopes that her analysis can help deflect the Cleator camp’s persistent charge that her call for a spending limit in the mayoral race would give her an unfair advantage because of the $780,000 campaign that she waged only three years ago. In this year’s primary, O’Connor spent about $30,000 less than a self-imposed $150,000 limit and has proposed a similar ceiling for the runoff. Cleator, who outspent O’Connor by about $100,000 in the primary, has not yet responded to O’Connor’s proposal.

Meanwhile, Cleator, following several weeks of what he called “a good, hard, honest look” at the primary’s results by his campaign staff, conceded that he still has “a selling job to do” in his attempt to shed his pro-development image. Another of the major conclusions of his campaign’s post-mortems on the primary is that he must keep the race focused on the differences between himself and O’Connor, Cleator said.

“After you talk about everything else, the issue still is, who will be able to bring people together and get things done--Maureen or Bill?” Cleator said. “I’ll say it’s me and she’ll say it’s her, but then we have to get people to look at our track records and backgrounds. That’s where you see the real differences.”

Those differences, Cleator said, include the contrast between his own lengthy business background and the fact that O’Connor, in his words, “hasn’t had a job” since leaving the council in 1979. That remark prompted an angry rejoinder from O’Connor: “During this time that Mr. Cleator says I was unemployed, I was working practically full time on the Port District and the trolley, donating my services to the community.”

“A significant personal difference” between the two candidates, Cleator added, is that he has been married 28 years and raised three children, while O’Connor and her husband of eight years, multimillionaire businessman Robert O. Peterson, have no children.

“This isn’t something I’m going to be standing on a soapbox talking about every night,” Cleator said. “But I think it is a way to compare people as far as experience. To me, raising a family is an accomplishment. On the other hand, I guess you could have 97 kids and be married 100 years, and if your head’s in the sand, your head’s still in the sand.”

Saying that Cleator’s comments on the candidates’ personal backgrounds “don’t even deserve a response,” O’Connor added, “I have no idea what point he’s trying to make. I come from a family of 13, and I’m very proud of my personal background. But is he trying to say you have to have children to serve in public office? That’s absurd. I don’t understand what he’s getting at.”

Cleator also drew O’Connor’s ire with recent public remarks that volatile topics such as abortion and the death penalty might become issues in the runoff, even though the mayor and the City Council have no legislative authority over those areas.

“Those things don’t have anything to do with the job, but they might become issues to the extent that some people want to know where we stand, and I think they have that right,” Cleator said. “I’m not going to bring them up, but if we get asked questions, I don’t see how we can sidestep stating our feelings. But are these the issues I’m going to be campaigning on? No.”

Adhering to a stance that she maintained throughout the primary, O’Connor said, however, that she will continue to decline to answer “non-relevant questions dealing with subjects over which the mayor has no control.”

Both Cleator and O’Connor also took advantage of the race’s recent lull to recover from serious colds and viruses. Cleator, who became very ill during the final week of the primary campaign--a factor that contributed to a dismal performance in a key televised forum two days before the election--said he still feels “a little weak” from his bout with a bronchial infection. O’Connor, meanwhile, said she is “back to close to 100%” after being bedridden for several days earlier this month as a result of a cold that she suspects she may have caught from Cleator.

“Maybe this is Bill’s secret weapon,” O’Connor joked.

Cleator, however, turned the final pun on the candidates’ illnesses.

“We’re getting better, but the public might be a little sick of us right now,” Cleator quipped.