MAKING SENSE OF MAUREEN - The Curious Politics of San Diego’s Mayor O’Connor

SHE HAD MASTERED the Soviet bureaucracy, defied her critics at home, and now, at the pinnacle of her political career, San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor would have to take on Mother Nature as well.

More than 60,000 people were jammed into the city’s beloved Balboa Park for “Super Powers Sunday,” the opening ceremony of the three-week Soviet arts festival to which O’Connor had devoted the past 16 months. Crushed together in the park’s open-air Spreckels Organ Pavilion on a late October day, thousands anxiously awaited the start of the ceremony as colorfully costumed children joined O’Connor and a troupe of Soviet Georgian dancers on stage.

And then it started to rain. The mayor’s audience headed for cover.

“Please, these people have come all the way from Tbilisi to dance for you,” O’Connor implored, shielding herself from the rain with a festival program. “I don’t care if it’s raining; it’s shining on San Diego!”

As if on cue, the drizzle stopped. Within the hour, the sun was out, and for the rest of Super Powers Sunday, the skies were as bright as O’Connor’s beaming face.

Throughout the day, the mayor basked in the kind of public adoration that is the stuff of a politician’s dreams. At some of the Balboa Park sites, where Soviet dancers and singers performed for thousands, O’Connor herself drew rousing ovations. Scores of San Diegans approached her entourage to pose for pictures or ask for autographs. Others shouted praise: “It’s a great party, Maureen.”

In the end, that’s all it was.

That O’Connor considers the $6-million arts extravaganza the triumph of her curious 3 1/2 years in office speaks volumes about the woman who in less than two decades has risen from high school gym teacher to first female mayor of America’s sixth-largest city. The festival posed the essential question skeptics have raised throughout O’Connor’s mayoralty: Why doesn’t she bring the same planning, dedication and hands-on approach to the city’s long-term problems that she devoted to assembling the world’s largest public showing of Faberge Imperial Eggs?

Frequently absent from the chambers of government while she served as virtual executive producer of the festival, the 43-year-old mayor has only sporadically functioned as the city’s leader. When the festival ended Nov. 12, the homeless were still sleeping in Balboa Park canyons near the exhibition areas. San Diego’s roads remained choked, its library and sewer system antiquated and inadequate. Despite recent staffing increases, the city’s police force was still undermanned in the face of crack cocaine traffic and street-gang warfare. Its trash-disposal crisis was mounting. It was no closer to finding a substitute for its crowded and dangerous airport.

Clearly, O’Connor inherited most of the urban ills that confront San Diego--crises that are similar to those facing every rapidly growing city. But sometimes it seems she is running an increasingly complex metropolis as if it were still the small city of her youth.

“Maureen O’Connor is a risk-averse politician,” says Steven Erie, a UC San Diego political scientist who has tracked O’Connor’s career. “She’s so incredibly cautious, so unwilling to take bold steps that, at best, she provides a reactive style of leadership. You don’t get any sense of the direction in which she’d like to take the city, or whether she even knows. What we’re left with is essentially a caretaker administration.”

O’Connor has heard it all before, particularly during the past two years, as the festival grew from a casual conversation with a Soviet culture official in Scotland to a major spectacle. “Let’s just take a minute to remember what San Diego was like before Maureen O’Connor became mayor,” O’Connor snapped when asked about these criticisms in a recent interview. “When I came in office three years ago, this place was a mess. The (previous) mayor had just been convicted of a felony, there was a councilman under indictment, a Housing Commission scandal, the city manager and council weren’t working together, we had a police department at odds with the city, problems like sewage, crime.

“Every single issue that was waiting on my plate has been improved. Critics might say we’re only 50% or 75% of the way there, but they can’t deny the progress that’s been made. This city’s working again.”

O’Connor’s effect has been felt both inside and outside City Hall, though often in ways difficult to record on a score card. Although political insiders quibble over whether the mayor lost this vote or dropped the ball on that issue, she is widely credited with returning integrity to a City Hall racked by turmoil.

“She’s restored people’s faith in city government, which is no small thing,” says Louis Wolfsheimer, a land-use attorney and longtime O’Connor confidant. “As far as issues, she’s identified the problems, knows what needs to be done and is moving the city ahead.”

Others are not nearly so charitable. In an anonymous survey of City Hall lobbyists, reporters and government staffers taken in February by the San Diego Report, a monthly political newsletter, O’Connor placed last in overall performance among the nine council members. She ranked seventh in effectiveness, eighth in intelligence and quality of staff, and last in accessibility.

Most often, she is criticized for abdicating responsibility on major issues, for lacking vision, for failing to display the leadership that her position demands.

As mayor, O’Connor’s “not one of the boys anymore,” says county Supervisor Brian Bilbray, a frequent critic. “People are expecting you to stand up and be heard. You either do that, or you don’t take on a position of leadership.”

STREET SMARTS

MAUREEN O’CONNOR IS wandering around Balboa Park, pressing the flesh of the faithful who have come to celebrate her finest hour. She is in her element. She is with her people. She is on the street.

Dressed in a tapered gray jacket with the oversized, padded shoulders she favors, O’Connor strolls arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gribanov, the Soviet acting minister of culture, and his entourage.

To the Soviets, who are not accustomed to a woman mayor or one so young, the constant displays of public affection for O’Connor are clearly intriguing. “Everyone’s calling you by your first name, which is fascinating,” remarks an interpreter. “This is quite amazing.”

“Oh, they all call me ‘Maureen,’ ” the mayor replies breezily, breaking into a broad grin. “That’s how I’m known here. That’s why they call me ‘the street mayor.’ ”

Say what they will about O’Connor’s performance in office, even her critics do not deny that she is genuinely popular on San Diego’s streets. A Democrat in a city long controlled by a Republican old-boy network and a slow-growth advocate among the wealthy builders who have dominated the political landscape, O’Connor has charmed San Diego with her schoolgirl style and from-the-heart pronouncements since she was elected a city councilwoman.

“She’s not one of these politicians who puts a wall up between her and the people,” said Georgia Tarwater, a festival volunteer from La Jolla, as she watched O’Connor, attired in black jeans, boots, a purple cowboy hat and matching scarf, dance at a Western-theme barbecue during the arts festival. “Her sense of caring is genuine and comes across that way. That’s what makes her so approachable.”

“People perceive her as being a San Diegan, which in this town is critical,” says Mark Nelson, former executive director of the San Diego Taxpayers Assn. “People perceive her as being part of San Diego.”

Raised in a lower-middle-class San Diego home, the daughter of a convenience-store owner and part-time bookie, O’Connor became a multimillionaire in 1977 when she married Jack in the Box restaurant-chain founder Robert O. Peterson, a man 30 years her senior. Although she now lives in a Spanish-style Point Loma mansion with a bay view, O’Connor never forgets that the Mission Hills home of her childhood sometimes went unheated. “At night,” she recalls, “when it was really cold and you had your blanket on, you might wake up and find it gone because someone had come in and taken it. So you learned how to sleep with your blanket between your knees for protection.”

O’Connor and her twin sister, Mavourneen, were born July 14, 1946, the seventh and eighth of the 13 children of Jerome and Frances O’Connor. O’Connor remembers her childhood as “a pretty no-frills life.” Dining out and going to movies were rarities, and only the children’s parochial-school uniforms disguised their lack of clothing. One year, when the family could not afford a Thanksgiving turkey, one of O’Connor’s brothers molded a bird from hamburger.

An average student known more for her sense of humor than her scholarship, the future mayor’s entry into politics was delayed when Rosary High nuns, who found her too feisty, barred her from running for student body president. Instead, O’Connor helped Mavourneen get elected to the post. Maureen graduated in 1964 and attended San Diego State University, earning a bachelor’s degree with a triple major in recreation, psychology and sociology in 1970.

With her parents and most of her siblings still living in San Diego, the O’Connor family is extremely close, despite the split between what O’Connor describes as her “Archie Bunker brothers” and “liberal sisters.”

She credits her parents for her public-service career. By the time O’Connor was a teen-ager, she and her six sisters had become accomplished precision and rough-water swimmers, touring the country in 1964 as the “Swimming O’Connor Sisters,” part of a traveling show called “The Wonderful World of Sport.” O’Connor’s mother, a nurse, introduced her children to community service by having them give swimming lessons to multiple sclerosis patients.

“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 recalls. “Public service is a natural outgrowth of that.”

In 1971, after O’Connor had started teaching physical education at Rosary High, she went to City Hall to complain about the treatment a troupe of Mexican-Indian performers had received during a city celebration. When she got the runaround, she resolved to run for office, more out of a desire to teach her students a civics lesson than out of ambition.

Later that year, O’Connor and her twin sister, guided by a borrowed library book on political campaigning, called a news conference to announce that O’Connor would make a long-shot run for City Council. She likes to tell the story of how, at the appointed hour, the gym was crammed with her partisans, mostly students and nuns.

Only the media failed to show.

Despite that inauspicious beginning, the lightly regarded candidate went on to score a stunning upset on a shoestring budget, aided by hundreds of Rosary High student volunteers dubbed “the Maureen Corps.” After qualifying for the two-candidate council runoff, O’Connor became, at 25, the youngest person ever elected to the San Diego City Council.

She served for eight years, becoming a member of then-Mayor Pete Wilson’s inner circle and a protege of his despite their differing party affiliations. O’Connor went on to become a port commissioner and member of the Metropolitan Transit Development Board, winning credit for overseeing the complicated negotiations that created San Diego’s trolley line, which opened in 1981. In 1983, she lost a bitter race for mayor against county Supervisor Roger Hedgecock.

Three years later, when Hedgecock was forced to resign as mayor after his conviction for perjury, O’Connor won the special election to complete his term by a 10-point margin. Last year, in her first bid for a full four-year term as mayor, O’Connor, enjoying name recognition and a lingering honeymoon from her 1986 victory, was considered so unbeatable that no serious opponent would run against her. She was reelected with 60% of the vote. Although Times surveys show her popularity rating has slipped from 69% to 48% in the past year and a half, O’Connor’s current 2-to-1 favorable rating is nonetheless healthy for a midterm mayor.

Buoyed by public support, aided by her remarkable political and public relations savvy, O’Connor repeatedly thumbs her nose at the downtown power structure and maintains a bond with San Diego citizens that delights her supporters and intimidates her opponents.

“My style’s probably confusing to those who make their living off politics--the Chamber of Commerce types, land-use attorneys, people like that,” O’Connor says. “They’re used to coming to City Hall and talking to the mayor over a desk. Well, I don’t have to be behind a desk to know what’s going on in the city.”

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

O’CONNOR’S POPULARITY on the street makes it all the more surprising to view her at City Hall. She is distant, isolated and defensive, guarded by a staff that is protective even by political standards. Uncomfortable as the city’s official figurehead, O’Connor hates to pose for photographs. She is a painfully inept speaker, even when reading from a prepared text. And despite an 18-year political career, she is amazingly thin-skinned: In November, O’Connor demanded that a local newspaper print a clarification of a description of her as the “gum-chewing Mayor O’Connor.” The mayor, her spokesman insisted, was munching a breath mint.

In contrast to her zest for conversation with the common man in “the neighborhoods,” as O’Connor calls them, the mayor appears uncomfortable dealing with some of the high-powered leaders who must command her attention. County supervisors, Chamber of Commerce executives and fellow mayors have waited in vain for O’Connor to return telephone calls about important city business. Prominent political players have been issued hints to line up with the hoi polloi for five minutes with O’Connor at twice-monthly “Meet the Mayor” sessions. Even as the county’s Superior Court judges considered moving the court system out of downtown because of a space crunch, they could not gain an audience with O’Connor to discuss the issue.

“We’ve found it’s much more effective to work around the mayor’s office than to work with it,” Supervisor Bilbray says, “because there’s just no access.”

Last spring, when she traveled to Sacramento for a hearing on the proposed merger of San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison, the mayor alienated a host of legislators with her behavior, according to Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Chula Vista). O’Connor has worked hard to thwart the merger, persuading the City Council to spend more than $2 million on lawyers for regulatory proceedings. She fears a loss of local control of the utility, 1,000 lost jobs and higher utility rates.

But “you don’t win votes by insulting people,” Peace says. “In particular, you don’t do so when you also demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge on the subject matter you’re dealing with. Unfortunately, the mayor came up and didn’t sound like a professional person or an elected official or an informed community leader or like an educated consumer activist. She came up sounding shrill and offensive.”

Vowing never to run for higher office while holding an elected post, O’Connor is almost apolitical when it comes to other candidates’ races. The mayor almost never issues endorsements; she infuriated local Democrats and aides for Michael S. Dukakis last year by failing to appear at a downtown rally for the presidential candidate.

Despite her populist proclivities, O’Connor maintains a kitchen cabinet that includes prominent land-use attorneys, relies on the financial backing of McDonald’s chain owner Joan Kroc and enjoys the editorial largess of friend Helen Copley, publisher of the Union and Tribune newspapers.

But she leans most heavily on family members. Her sister Colleen, who made two trips to the Soviet Union to negotiate loans of festival artwork, is a frequent adviser who helps write O’Connor’s yearly State of the City addresses. Mavourneen, a developer of low-cost senior citizen housing, is a frequent sounding board. And there’s Peterson, a self-made political mover and shaker in San Diego despite suffering from leukemia for the past decade.

Perhaps because of her insular style, O’Connor is deeply suspicious of the press, often dodging phone calls from all but a handful of local columnists who give her flattering treatment. The mayor prefers closed-door negotiation to public debate. She is quick to point out that citizens now are offered more time to speak at council meetings, but the City Council under O’Connor has shown a penchant for considering arguably public matters in private. Most recently, the council met privately to discuss a lawsuit filed by a Latino coalition seeking to expand the council from 8 to 12 seats, thereby improving minority representation. The city’s attorneys argued that the council’s discussion of its legal strategy should be privileged, but some observers believe that debate about the city’s electoral system should be public.

AFTERNOONS AT THE MOVIES

DEEPLY EMBEDDED IN O’Connor’s style is her enduring contempt for Hedgecock, the only person to defeat her in an election, one she believes he captured by accepting illegal campaign contributions. Reporters at radio station KSDO, where Hedgecock is now an O’Connor-bashing talk-show host, believe that they are routinely denied interviews with the mayor because of his presence there. The mayor’s spokesman denies the claim, but O’Connor maintains a strict policy of refusing to appear publicly with Hedgecock.

“He’s a convicted felon. He’s on the radio, making $100,000. He is not repentant about his crime,” says Paul Downey, a spokesman for O’Connor.

Some believe that O’Connor ran for mayor in 1986 simply to win. “Maureen wanted to prove that . . . ’83 turned out the way it did because Roger had cheated,” a former insider recalls. “There really wasn’t much thought given to what would happen afterward or what the agenda would be. . . . Winning was an end in itself.”

The bottom line for many, in fact, is the question of how interested O’Connor is in governing. From growth control to the airport to the trash crisis, she has abdicated leadership to council colleagues and left personal priorities unfinished.

O’Connor is not among the council’s hardest workers, slipping out of her office occasionally to take in matinee movies (often police sagas). She has not attended a meeting of the Housing Commission, of which she is vice chairman, in more than seven months. (In her defense, Downey notes that O’Connor often guides the city’s affairs via telephone from her home late into the night.)

O’Connor steadfastly defends her performance, claiming that she works quietly and effectively behind the scenes, a style to which the public and the media are not accustomed. “There’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit,” the mayor says, reciting one of her favorite political aphorisms. “My ego doesn’t demand that my name be on everything.”

“I think she is vastly underrated as a leader,” said Paul Peterson, a building industry lobbyist (no relation to O’Connor’s husband) and informal adviser to the mayor. “I’ve seen her in action, and . . . the fact is she has a method of keeping the city on an even keel that’s very effective.”

NO-FRILLS TO RICHES

WHEN SUPER POWERS SUNDAY dawned cool and overcast, the mayor fretted to one of her closest friends, a nun whom she has known since her teaching days, about the weather’s effect on the turnout. “Maureen’s always afraid she’s going to throw a party and no one will come,” Sister Jeannette Black said, chuckling as she walked beside the mayor during the event, which proved to be the biggest single-day draw in the park’s history.

O’Connor need not have worried. Pausing along the park’s historic Prado, O’Connor stretched her 5-foot-2 frame for a view of the growing mid-afternoon crowd and could not help but smile at what she saw. Even before the skies cleared, attendance surpassed the most optimistic predictions. “Geez, Louise!” O’Connor said, squinting as she surveyed the scene. “This is a long way from Rosary High School.”

It was there in 1971 that, as a $450-a-month gym teacher and come-from-nowhere council candidate, O’Connor was pursued by a political power broker whose candidate had been eliminated during the primary. When Bob Peterson’s repeated telephone calls to Rosary High began to irk the nuns in charge, O’Connor finally spoke to the man who “wanted to know about this girl that defeated his candidate.”

They began dating several years later and were married in a 1977 ceremony in the south of France. It was Peterson’s fifth marriage, O’Connor’s first, and a match O’Connor calls “the best decision I ever made.” The couple separated after her 1983 election loss, filing divorce papers before reconciling less than a year later.

Peterson is a man of diverse interests, including fabric dyeing, gourmet cooking and landscaping. He once invested in research about synthesizing firefly luminescence for medical use. Describing her husband as “truly a Renaissance man,” O’Connor says he “broadened me tremendously . . . by exposing me to a world I’d never seen before.” For a woman from less-than-comfortable beginnings, the marriage also has provided O’Connor with exotic vacations, designer clothing, a Mendocino retreat and a backyard lap pool behind a mansion where cooks prepare the meals. Perhaps because of her upbringing, O’Connor wears her new economic status almost self-consciously, despite the more powerful and glamorous circles in which she now travels.

Peterson encouraged O’Connor to run for mayor, and she says her husband’s chronic illness has never held her back. “He didn’t want this to control his life,” she says, “and it hasn’t.” But Peterson’s leukemia often keeps him from attending public functions with his wife.

“Bob’s been extremely supportive,” O’Connor adds. “This job would be difficult on any marriage, even without this additional problem. His health has its ups and downs, and we’ve just learned to live with it and keep moving ahead.”

CURSING ‘LOS ANGELIZATION’

O’CONNOR PRESIDES OVER a San Diego dramatically different from the city in which she grew up, or even the one that existed when she took office in 1971. During her two four-year terms on the council, San Diego began to outgrow its reputation as a sleepy Navy town near Tijuana to become one of the nation’s largest cities--and one of its fastest growing: Since 1970, San Diego’s population has increased 58%, to 1.1 million. Between 1983, when O’Connor first ran for mayor, and 1988, more than 70,000 homes sprouted in San Diego’s unprecedented building boom.

The staggering growth rate has brought big-city problems that San Diegans curse as “Los Angelization”--traffic jams, air and water pollution, vanishing open space, crowded schools and parks--in short, a decline in the quality of life that brought many to the city in the first place.

Few question that O’Connor inherited significant challenges when she was inaugurated as mayor on July 7, 1986, to fill out Hedgecock’s unexpired term. Hedgecock had spent much of his brief term absorbed in his legal battle, and his predecessor, Wilson, now the junior senator from California, had ended an 11-year tenure as something of an absentee mayor while he campaigned for higher office. The city and City Hall were reeling from a handful of corruption scandals, most notably J. David Dominelli’s 1984 Ponzi scheme, which defrauded investors of $80 million.

Elected on a platform that emphasized slowing growth, O’Connor soon pushed through a landmark ordinance that for 18 months capped the number of homes that could be built citywide, though some of the city’s most rapidly developing areas were exempted. Confronted by a conservative, developer-backed council majority, the new mayor also sought to convince the average citizen that he would be heard at City Hall.

“In 1986, community groups felt very strongly that developers had a lock on City Hall,” O’Connor maintains. “Now the neighborhood groups feel very strongly that they’re sitting at the decision-making table.”

In February, 1987, she persuaded the council to reverse its stand and begin the $2.8-billion task of cleaning up the city’s sewage to comply with the federal Clean Water Act. The following year, however, the city was sued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to comply quickly enough. As a result, it faces millions of dollars in fines.

The new mayor also called for more police and a crackdown on street drug sales. This year, the council added 116 officers to the police force, slashing $5 million from other parts of the city budget to do so. To establish tighter control by the City Council, O’Connor also took the Housing Commission away from its citizen board of directors.

But as time wore on, the promising beginnings of O’Connor’s tenure were replaced by her dawdling on issues and appointments, and, later, her devotion to the arts festival. O’Connor’s performance on the growth issue, perhaps the city’s most chronic problem, is illuminating.

Ranked by the Sierra Club as the council’s most dependable environmental vote, O’Connor nevertheless failed to campaign for the City Council’s 1988 permanent growth-control initiative--which had taken nearly two years to bring to the ballot--until shortly before the election. With only days to go, the mayor abruptly endorsed both the city’s measure and a stricter, rival initiative placed on the ballot by a slow-growth group.

Both measures, and two more covering the unincorporated areas of San Diego County, were crushed by a nearly $3-million spending campaign mounted by developers, the most expensive campaign in city history. The council subsequently enacted a series of ordinances that accomplished some of the goals of the city’s ballot measure, but not enough to satisfy some of the slow-growth advocates who helped propel O’Connor into office. O’Connor and others have said that the package of laws was the best they could get, given the City Council’s composition.

But O’Connor’s critics accused her of doing too little too late. “If the building industry didn’t have Maureen O’Connor, they’d have to invent her,” says Peter Navarro, leader of the vanquished slow-growth organization Citizens for Limited Growth. “You have a figurehead mayor who projects the illusion that she’s getting things done on growth management and the environment, and that keeps the public at bay.”

“Sooner or later,” says Dick Dresner, a former O’Connor political consultant whom she dropped after the 1988 election, “people are going to realize that the emperor--or, in this case, empress--has no clothes.”

THE WEEKEND TRANSIENT

O’CONNOR HAS MADE youth-oriented programs a priority throughout her political career, in part because she cannot have children of her own. “Everyone’s dealt a deck of cards, and children didn’t happen to be in mine,” O’Connor says. “But I compensate for that. Being able to do something for kids is one of the real joys of this job.”

O’Connor frequently visits the poor and victimized, serving as a kind of Florence Nightingale backed by the substantial resources of the government and the prestige of the mayor’s office.

In July, when 9-year-old Joshua Garrett had his skull fractured by a teen-ager wielding a baseball bat from a passing car, O’Connor privately visited his hospital room, and later took Joshua and his mother home in her city car.

There, they discovered that the family’s apartment had been ransacked by burglars who left it a shambles. After tucking Joshua’s mother, Theresa, into bed, O’Connor spent the next four hours straightening up the apartment--washing dishes, sending her police escort out for pizza, buying groceries, making child-care arrangements for Garrett’s children and demanding that the building manager fix Garrett’s broken bathtub.

“She took the time and effort to do something for my family,” Theresa Garrett recalls. “She didn’t have to do that. She didn’t have to do that at all.”

This may be O’Connor at her best. She has personally painted a Boys Club wrecked by vandals and sat up for two days with a dying port commissioner. She has hauled trash, ladled food at shelters for the homeless and toured the city handing out Christmas gifts to shut-ins.

In a locally celebrated and nationally publicized odyssey, O’Connor spent two days in 1988 living on San Diego’s streets disguised as a transient. Accompanied by undercover police officers and two disguised reporters, she watched drug deals, picked through encampments in the canyons of Balboa Park and washed furniture at a shelter for the privilege of taking a shower.

O’Connor’s critics scorned the action as a publicity stunt, noting that the mayor’s memo describing the tour focused on crime, drugs and filth, instead of homelessness. “You can’t experience homelessness in two days on the street,” says Frank Landerville, executive director of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless.

But O’Connor credits her wanderings throughout the city and frequent police ride-alongs in the crack-infested sections of southeast San Diego for her knowledge of how San Diegans feel and what they need. “I know before the pollsters realize there’s a problem,” O’Connor says, “because I do that. I go out. I spend a lot of time on the streets and I get criticized for it. That’s my style.”

“This isn’t typical political behavior--that’s what confuses and perplexes a lot of people about Maureen,” confidant Wolfsheimer says. “She takes her signals from what she picks up from talking to people at shopping malls or riding around with cops, not from polls or other politicians.”

‘JUST SAY NYET’

O’CONNOR LIKES TO say that the arts festival proved that San Diego had “come of age” culturally and perhaps, in some small way, further warmed U.S.-Soviet relations. “To see Frish the Clown (of the Moscow Circus) mixing with Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse, . . . it was wonderful,” O’Connor gushed between bites of Russian food.

But a Soviet clown holding hands with two walking corporate logos hardly marks a significant new chapter in glasnost. The arts festival, announced at O’Connor’s January, 1988, State of the City address, once again set some San Diegans to wondering about O’Connor’s priorities for the city. The project also conjured up recollections of Hedgecock’s caustic dismissal of O’Connor in their 1983 showdown as “a little rich girl with nothing better to do” than dabble in politics, someone better suited to organizing a party than to managing a major American city.

O’Connor threw herself, body and soul, into the festival like nothing else she has tackled during her tenure. Despite the appointment of two festival coordinators, the mayor controlled the show from start to finish, personally selecting the opening ceremony songs: “We Are the World” and “It’s a Small World.”

Negotiating the labyrinthine Soviet bureaucracy, O’Connor persuaded the Kremlin Armory museum and U.S. billionaire Malcolm Forbes to lend the festival their collections of Faberge Imperial Eggs for a showing of 27 of the bejeweled artifacts. Two Soviet dramas, “Brothers and Sisters” and “Slingshot,” were brought here for their U.S. premieres; for an opera production, the mayor chose Mussorgsky’s masterpiece “Boris Godunov.”

The festival was a huge political gamble for O’Connor, who inaugurated the event without assurances that the public would attend. Moreover, she was asking the military-dominated city of San Diego to embrace the Soviets. In the era of Gorbachev, she was offering Czarist art. Some artists sniffed at the quality of the exhibits.

To top it off, O’Connor set off howls when she asked the council to finance the festival with $3 million in city hotel taxes at a time when the sewer system, the roads and the police force were begging for funds. “Just Say Nyet” and “Homeless Children Can’t Eat Faberge Eggs” bumper stickers were circulated.

Lobbying the City Council with rare fervor, O’Connor won the public funding, plus an additional $500,000 from the San Diego Unified Port District, which Wolfsheimer heads. She rounded up more than $3 million in private contributions, including $1.4 million from Kroc and the Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities, $250,000 from Helen Copley and $250,000 more from the James S. Copley Foundation.

The result was a festival of astounding popularity and some rave reviews, particularly for the two dramas. In a Times poll conducted during the festival’s final weekend, residents favored it by a 72% to 19% margin, and 33% said they or a family member had attended at least one event. Organizers reported that a total of 600,000 people attended during the festival’s 22-day run.

Whether the extravaganza proved an artistic or financial success and how it will serve as Maureen O’Connor’s legacy remain open questions. Her office maintains that the festival and the national publicity it generated have elevated San Diego’s standing as a cultural center. Although the poll found residents refuted the mayor’s notion that the festival demonstrated that San Diego had “come of age,” San Diegans heartily welcomed O’Connor’s proposal that similar festivals be held every three years, beginning in 1992.

The mayor feels vindicated.

“Did you see the movie ‘Field of Dreams?’ ” O’Connor asks. “That’s what the arts festival was to me. It was my field of dreams. And the voice I heard was the voice of the people.

“The critics were all waiting for me to fail. I heard that this was going to be my funeral. Well, they were wrong, and I knew they would be. Frankly, it just brought home a lesson I learned a long time ago in politics. If I hadn’t tried to do all the things that my critics over the years have said couldn’t be done, I’d probably still be back teaching phys ed. I listen to the people. And thanks to them, I’ve been under a very lucky star.”