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San Francisco's assertive homosexual population unexpectedly won the balance of political power in that city. Mayor Dianne Feinstein had expected to win a majority, but she polled only 42%. That forced her into a Dec. 11 runoff, which she might lose to Runner-Up Quentin Kopp, a conservative member of the board of supervisors. One reason Feinstein failed to win was the success of minor candidates: Punk-Rock Singer Jello Biafra astonished even himself by taking 3% of the vote. More significant, David Scott, an openly homosexual real estate agent who called Feinstein and Kopp "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," won 10%. How his followers vote will be decisive in the runoff, and both candidates will be courting them in the next few weeks. They must do so while also appealing to an apparent conservative mood among other voters. San Franciscans defeated proposals to install strict rent controls, disband the city's vice squad and raise business taxes.
In Cleveland and Philadelphia, a kind of politics of civility triumphed; both cities elected men who presented themselves as healers to succeed loudly abrasive mayors. Cleveland's self-styled populist, Dennis Kucinich, elected in 1977 at the age of 31, won nationwide notoriety for his abusive assaults on the city council, Cleve land's big corporations and banks — and even more for the fact that Cleveland last year became the first major U.S. city since the 1930s to default on debt repayments. Cold-shouldered by the Cleveland Democratic organization and almost beaten in a recall election last year, Kucinich fo cused his campaign for re-election on Cleveland's blacks; he persuaded Heavyweight Champion Larry Holmes and former Mayor Carl Stokes to endorse him on TV. The strategy did not work: Kucinich lost to Republican George Voinovich, Ohio's Lieutenant Governor, who played down his party affiliation and promised "a new spirit of cooperation" among businessmen, labor, and civic and neighborhood groups. Voinovich carried ten of Cleveland's 13 black wards as well as most of the city's white districts. Said he: "Populism doesn't mean anything if you can't deliver services to the people. They can't eat populism, they can't put it over their roofs."
And Philadelphia bade farewell to Frank Rizzo, the outspoken ex-cop who once appealed to Philadelphians to "vote white." Rizzo failed last year to persuade voters to amend the city charter so that he could win a third term, and he stayed grumpily aloof from the election, pronouncing a pox on all his would-be successors. Said he: "Between the three of them, if you scrambled their brains, you wouldn't get a half-wit."
The easy winner was William Green, one of the city's Congressmen for seven terms. Green's father ran the Democratic machine for years in a metropolis where registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans almost 4 to 1. Ted Kennedy campaigned for him, and Green spent five times as much money as his two opponents put together.
In Minneapolis too the hard-nosed cop image seemed to lose its appeal. It was personified in that city by Charles Stenvig, a policeman who won three two-year terms as mayor, the most recent in 1975. He tried for a fourth last week, distributing one pamphlet in which he was pictured wrapped in the American flag.