SAN DIEGO was supposed to host the Republican convention back in 1972, but the party chairman switched it to Miami when a suggestion of bribery by a multinational company made him take fright. The chairman was none other than Bob Dole, who was duly anointed the Grand Old Party candidate this week in the city he once snubbed.
San Diego has forgiven him, which should not be hard given the millions of dollars his party has brought to the one time tiny missionary settlement which now calls itself "the first great city of the 21st century". Surfing, jazz bars, nude dancing clubs, drag queens, Italian restaurants, theatres, museums and one of the best zoos in the country co-exist happily.
Two Irish pubs, Kenny's and the Ould Sod, keep their end up also, thanks to the efforts of Joe O'Donnell from Portarlington and Martin Brennan from Sligo.
At the beginning of the century San Diego was competing with Los Angeles for trade and investment but lost out. The main railway link with the east went to Los Angeles, which also built a more extensive port. With hindsight this was a blessing, as it preserved the lovely San Diego waterfront from the worst excesses of industrial blight.
San Diego has a fascinating history as one of the oldest settlements by Spanish explorers on the West Coast. The first to arrive was Cabrillo who sailed into the beautiful deep water bay in 1542 and called it San Miguel because it was the saint's feast day.
The next Spanish explorer Vizcaino, came in 1602 and renamed the settlement San Diego after the patron saint of his flagship. It is now believed that an Asiatic tribe which came over the land bridge from Siberia settled here about 9,000 years ago and later mixed with Indian tribes moving in from the Sierra Nevada.
The Spanish missionaries' followed the explorers and in 1769 the Franciscan Junipero Serra, established the first California mission. The mission flourished, but San Diego got caught up in the war between its Mexican rulers and the expansionary United States. The US flag was raised here on July 29th, 1846. The border with Mexico was fixed a dozen miles south along the coast at Tijuana, which can be reached today by tram.
Today San Diego is a bit of everything. Behind the soaring towers of the bayside hotels lies the Spanish old town, from which Roy Bean was expelled for getting the place a bad name with his duelling. Later he became "Judge" Roy Bean in west Texas.
Downtown is now a mixture of the restored "Gas lamp" area which flourished in the last century after the arrival of the entrepreneur Alonzo Horton from San Francisco, and the 1985 labyrinthine shopping plaza named after him.
San Diego, with its year round blue skies, because a favoured spot for aviation pioneers such as Charles Lindbergh. Soon the US marines and the navy followed and they sustained the city when it hit bad times as the aircraft and defence industries laid off thousands of workers.
Telecommunications and biotech industries are now replacing the older ones. But many of the 60,000 workers laid off in the recession and the Mexican immigrant workers who used to flow across the border are the less glamourous side of San Diego which tourists do not see.
They live in run down suburbs hidden away from the more glamorous quarters. Social workers complain that the city is cutting back on services for its poorer residents. The illegals who do most of the fruit picking on the ranches inland live in hovels.
Immigration has become a hot political issue as it is estimated that 40 per cent of the illegals are settling in California. Governor Pete Wilson avoided defeat in 1994 by supporting a referendum to end benefits for illegals and exclude their children from public education.
The mayor, Susan Golding, boasts that San Diego crushed a rising crime rate by imaginative means. The city was the first one to retrain its entire police force as "neighbourhood officers'. A youth curfew was also imposed and is now favoured by President Clinton for other cities in the US with a teenage crime problem.
Politically, San Diego used to be a middle class bastion of Republicanism thanks to the high numbers of professionals, retired naval officers and business tycoons living in affluent La Jolla. But the arrival of younger university staff and engineers for the hi tech industries has tilted the balance and San Diego voted Democrat for the first time to help put Bill Clinton in the White House in 1992.
Even as the Republicans poured into San Diego for the convention, the latest poll showed that Clinton was still the more popular. Maybe the locals have not really forgiven Dole for running away back in 1972.