MEYERSON ON TAP

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.