One balmy night in September 1988 San Diego's Mayor Maureen O'Connor spent the night in Balboa Park, not to take the air beneath the palm fronds but to sample the life of homeless people. In jeans and baseball cap, she watched a series of drug deals go down. She spent a second night among more vagrants at a skid row mission. Throughout most of her 48 hours on the streets, she went unrecognized -- until Sister Raymonda, a nun who has known the mayor for years, spotted her resting on a bench reading the paper and whispered, "If you want to conceal your identity, you should remember that homeless women don't read the financial pages."
The mayor's expedition into the world of the downtrodden was indeed an attention-getting departure for someone who also happens to be a millionaire. But the excursion was less startling in this city, which tends to write its own rules for its free-form public life. One rule is that a woman politician, perhaps better than a man, can attempt the new and different. For San Diego is where the new is the norm and woman power is a dominant force in the political game. Here the "smoke-filled rooms," such as they are, tend to be flamingo- colored restaurants overlooking the Pacific surf. And here the "machine," such as it is, rests in the hands of a key coterie of women, especially three elegant ladies from the smart set.
Mayor O'Connor, 43, -- "Mayor Mo," as she is airily addressed by her constituents -- is at the center of a powerful troika of female leadership. The other two members do not hold public office and hardly need to. One is the region's foremost publisher, Helen Copley, 67, the stately owner of the San Diego Union and Tribune and a chain of 40 other papers. The other is philanthropist Joan Kroc, 61, the vivacious majority stockholder in McDonald's and owner of the San Diego Padres.
Together these wealthy women call many of the shots in the West's second largest city. They set the tone of its breezy conservatism. They generate much of its impulse for urban face lifting and instant culture. They influence, and in fact make, many of the city's major civic decisions. "Every day I get up and thank God that we have Mrs. Kroc and Mrs. Copley in San Diego," the mayor says extravagantly. "They go not just the extra mile, but the extra 100 miles. What they do for this community -- and they don't have to -- goes beyond any mayor's wildest expectations of private-public partnership."
The teamwork can produce useful political results. O'Connor, a Democrat, has for years enjoyed the regular support of Copley's conservative Republican papers. So have other candidates for county and state office after O'Connor introduced them to her powerful friend. One recent beneficiary was newly elected State Senator Lucy Killea, a Democrat famed for having been banned from Catholic Communion for her pro-choice abortion stand.