Since its beginning as gold town, San Francisco has basked in its exceptionalism. Now, the scandal over a bacchanalia feting one well-known pol suggests that the city's libertine days are over and a new era is about to begin. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of "Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father," writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, Harper's and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A couple of weeks ago, Jack Davis, a political strategist in San Francisco who makes and unmakes careers, turned fifty. A lot of people have been talking about it ever since.

Admittedly, San Francisco is the kind of place that loves to talk about itself. This may be the most original city in America, but it is also the most provincial.

The genius of Herb Caen, this town's favorite newspaper columnist who died several months ago, was to make the city seem like a neighborhood. In Caen's San Francisco, the same twenty or thirty names would recur. We'd read in the morning paper about last night's party at Gordon and Anne Getty's or the latest doings of Mr. Caen's protege, Willie Brown, "His Willikens."

Now that Caen has died, the closest thing that we have to a poet defloriate is Armistead Maupin, who, in several books, has rendered San Francisco as a neighborhood of yuppies bedding with yuppies, gay or straight -- the city as soap opera.

There is originality here. Perched on the tip of a peninsula, San Francisco has basked in its exceptionalism. At its beginning, as gold town, San Francisco imagined itself separate from the Wild West, a pocket Paris. To this day, San Francisco marks its distinction from neighboring suburbs, even from the rest of America. If you're getting hassled in Kansas, come to San Francisco!

For all its famous liberalism, however, there is something very tight about this place. Maybe because it's so small, it has encouraged oversized egos. This is a town of insiders. Politically, for more than a generation, the city has been run by the Burton machine, a network of Democratic party pols and labor bosses.

There they were, two weeks ago, at the Jack Davis party. Willie Brown was there, various city supervisors, along with executives for the 49ers. (The 49ers -- whose owners live in Ohio, of all places! -- have hired Jack Davis to run their campaign for an initiative to build a football stadium-shopping mall in one of the city's most unfortunate neighborhoods.)

For some months now, Mayor Brown has assured us that the new football stadium-shopping mall is a great idea. Labor bosses have promised it will bring several thousand jobs. And it will cost us only $100 million tax dollars.

Back to the party. Jack Davis, the insider's insider, had turned fifty. There were strippers, male and female. There were sex acts, simulated or real. But the evening's climax was a satanic ritual involving blood letting, urination and a woman made up as Pocahontas.

In many ways, the party was more geezer than cutting-edge San Francisco. Maybe if it had been done with more flair, San Franciscans would have approved.

As it was, everyone at the party ended up sorry to have been there. The papers and the talk shows have been crowded with voices, complaining about insiders who think that they can get away with anything.

Even before the Davis bacchanalia, there were indications that the 49ers' campaign was not going well. San Francisco might yet prove its originality by refusing to subsidize the ambitions of Ohio millionaires.

Meanwhile, there is Willie Brown. Since his election, he has entertained the city with his flair. (San Francisco is a town where it is common knowledge that the mayor wears Brioni suits.) Alas, there are indications that our dapper mayor may be due for a fall.

In Sacramento, as Speaker of the Assembly, Brown was brilliant negotiating among politicians. In San Francisco, a city that is increasingly dissatisfied with its failing municipal services, the prospect of Mr. Brown sweet-dealing labor bosses is not playing well.

But something more important is brewing. This town's Asian population is stirring, sensing its power, numbers, inevitability.

Publicly, for example, defiant directors of the new Asian Museum -- destined to be built in the now disused old main library -- have announced their determination to remove some lovely murals of old California as too "Euro-centric." Privately, one hears Chinese parents who are near rebellion against the black-and-white liberal establishment that has mismanaged the city schools.

I recall, some years back, Herb Caen announcing in his column that some rich Japanese had just purchased a mansion in swank Pacific Heights. A couple of days after, Caen admitted that the home buyers were, in fact, Americans of Japanese descent.

Nearly every day now in the Chronicle there are letters from readers bemoaning the loss of Caen's column. The city has lost its way, they say. The truth is more complicated. We are not, after all, some misplaced Paris. This tight little town of liberals and libertines will soon be transformed into an Asian capital.