American Notes San Francisco

When he was elected mayor of San Francisco in 1987, Art Agnos described himself as an outsider who would shake up city hall. Four years later, he finds himself on the outside again. Last week the liberal Agnos was defeated in his bid for a second term by former police chief Frank Jordan, a self- described moderate with little patience for the city's high-profile populations of homeless people and panhandlers. Jordan got 52% of the vote.

Jordan benefited from a coalition of blue-collar and rich voters peeved that under Agnos the city seemed more interested in declaring itself a sanctuary for Desert Storm war resisters than in keeping Market Street clean. Long delays in repairing freeways damaged in the 1989 earthquake, while not attributable to Agnos, did not help his image. Meanwhile, increasingly militant posturing by activist gays -- a key group of Agnos supporters -- sent more conventional voters scurrying to Jordan's camp. The final blows for Agnos were a sputtering economy and fewer dollars to spend on costly social programs such as caring for AIDS victims.

Those problems will not vanish before Jordan takes over in January. But his victory showed that even in one of the nation's most liberal cities, competent management is more important to voters than political correctness.