A Talent for Comedy and Liberal Politics
The weekend was already awash with mortal horror when the news came of the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. More than 20 years ago, I interviewed Reiner on two occasions, both times about his campaigns for the public provision of care and schooling for toddlers, but I can’t claim that either interchange provided me with any special insights into this talented artist and liberal activist par excellence. My assignment was to engage Reiner on how to push California policy down a more liberal path, particularly as regards its treatment of kids. But he was so generous with his time that I was able to steer our talk into the topic I really wanted him to discuss: his window on two generations of stellar American comedy.
That meant not only his work on Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, and When Harry Met Sally. It also meant his growing up around not just his father, but also around his father’s pals and collaborators, most particularly Norman Lear and Mel Brooks. I mean, imagine growing up while in the next room two guys are developing the “2000 Year Old Man” act.
In the day since I heard the news of Rob’s death, it’s occurred to me that instances in which a brilliant comic artist had a brilliant comic son or daughter are rare. Comedic genes have been passed down, to be sure, from Jerry to Ben Stiller, Harry Einstein to Albert Brooks, Eugene to Daniel Levy, though the Reiners’ ability to create humanistic send-ups and comic romances seems rarer still. Whatever it was that set Carl and Rob on this trajectory—a generosity of spirit alien to most great comics? a comfort level with being just one instrument in a comedic ensemble?—it suffused both their careers, in front of and behind the cameras.
That generosity of spirit also defined Rob’s political projects. He was a mainstream liberal, devoted to expanding social rights and benefits to people arbitrarily denied them. They included children for whom the state provided free educations between the ages of five and 18, but not during their most developmentally important years of birth through five. In 1998, he mounted a successful initiative campaign to set up a state program providing services to those preschoolers, funded by a sales tax on tobacco (which, he hoped, might also have the effect of shrinking the youth market for smoking). He then persuaded a conservative icon—NRA front man Charlton Heston—to be the public face of the campaign, which gave the campaign the transpartisan oomph it needed to prevail over the gazillion-dollar opposition campaign funded by Big Tobacco. Eight years later, he mounted another campaign to establish universal pre-K for four-year-olds, to be funded by a surtax on the wealthiest Californians. That campaign didn’t prevail, coming as it did before the stratospheric rise in the cost of child care. It nonetheless heralded the campaigns of two New York progressives—Bill de Blasio and Zohran Mamdani—to raise taxes on the wealthy to fund pre-K and child care. Should Mamdani succeed in that venture, and should that success set a standard that other cities and states eventually match, it will be part not just of his legacy, but Reiner’s as well.
In 2008, when Californians narrowly approved a ballot measure (Proposition 8) that banned same-sex marriage, Reiner founded an organization to challenge its constitutionality, and funded a lawsuit that employed attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies—who’d been the lead attorneys for George W. Bush and Al Gore, respectively, in 2000’s Bush v. Gore—to argue that the Constitution guaranteed the right to marry to same-sex couples no less than to male-female ones. Their argument persuaded both the district and appellate courts to strike down Prop 8, and helped lay the groundwork for the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the right to same-sex marriage in 2015. By enlisting both Olson and Boies, as he’d enlisted Heston in his tobacco tax/child services campaign, Reiner displayed the kind of realpolitik sensibility that’s particularly necessary when campaigning for marginalized groups and causes that are not yet all that mainstream.
Reiner was not a left populist, even though he promoted taxes on the rich to fund social provisions he believed were overdue for expansion. Rather, he personified the liberal establishment at its best, employing both his wealth and his smarts to promote greater social equality and a sane climate policy (he was particularly close to Al Gore during his presidential campaign), and to take on the radical right and Donald Trump. He’ll rightly be remembered more for his films than his politics, but his generosity of spirit and anger at injustice suffused both.
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