Meathead’s Crusade

It is midafternoon in a windowless room in an office building south of the San Francisco airport, and the man once known as Meathead is perspiring. His beefy hands gesticulate and then clutch the podium as he confides his life story. “Twenty years ago,” he says, “I had a tough time in my life. I got divorced. I went into therapy. Now I’m doing O.K. I have three kids, a good job.” Pause. “A nice suit.” The audience laughs on cue, and the former Meathead plunges on. “But the early experiences I had as a child directly affected how I functioned in life–in the workplace, with friends, with the opposite sex…”

It might seem to be show biz–all the more because the speaker is Rob Reiner, the onetime regular on All in the Family and now a renowned movie director. But the speech, before the American Heart Association, is only tangentially about Reiner’s childhood. More directly, he is imploring his listeners to help get out the vote for Proposition 10, a California ballot initiative that would tax tobacco to fund programs for preschoolers. “Politicians like to say children are the future,” Reiner says, “but what have they done for them? Everyone knows that the first three years of life is when the brain develops. We must give every child a good start.”

Reiner, 51, is author and chief promoter of one of the more ambitious pieces of social legislation ever crafted on a state level. Picking up where the U.S. Congress left off when a proposed $368 billion federal tobacco lawsuit settlement was killed in June, Prop 10 would add a 50[cent] tax to each pack of cigarettes sold in California. The money, up to $700 million a year, would be channeled into antitobacco programs and early-childhood health and education. The higher prices would result in an estimated 25% drop in smoking–and consequent savings in the state’s $7 billion annual cost of tobacco-related disease, according to the American Cancer Society.

The tobacco companies, fearing that Prop 10 could set a precedent for other states, have mobilized a Committee Against Unfair Taxes, which is expected to spend more than $20 million for television ads and direct mail. “You know it’s easy to vote against tobacco,” coos a comely blond from her suburban kitchen in one TV spot. “But if you’re against higher taxes and bigger bureaucracy, vote no on Prop 10.” Last week, tobacco companies were busy faxing around an endorsement from the Los Angeles Times’ political columnist. “So Big Brother, what’s next?” wrote George Skelton. “A surtax on beer? Red meat? American cheddar?”

But just in case some voters associate such initiatives as prenatal nutrition, day care, parental education and domestic-violence prevention with big-spending liberalism, Reiner and his highly paid political consultants have cleverly lined up a cast of conservative backers. Former Senate candidate Michael Huffington and Los Angeles Republican mayor Richard Riordan are co-chairmen, and Pat Boone has posed for a G.O.P.-directed mailer. Indeed, the measure was crafted to avoid a “Big Government” label: it would apportion most of the tax revenue according to the number of births in each county and distribute it to commissions of unsalaried appointees named by local elected officials. “Prop 10 is antibureaucratic,” intones Charlton Heston, the new president of the National Rifle Association, in a radio spot. “That’s the kind of local control I support.”

Reiner expects to spend $6.3 million on Prop 10, including $1.1 million of his own. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has taped a TV spot. Groups including the American Lung Association and the California Medical Association have contributed funds and organizers. Hollywood heavies from Steven Spielberg to Robin Williams have given money; and Hillary Clinton has agreed to attend an L.A. fund raiser. “Prop 10 would utterly transform the well-being of small children across the state,” says Peter Digre, director of the L.A. County Department of Child Welfare Services.

Polls show Prop 10 ahead 48% to 33%, with 19% undecided. If it passes, it will be another testament to the ability of an individual to affect the course of social policy in America’s largest state. In 1978 Howard Jarvis transformed California’s tax status with his Prop 13; last June computer magnate Ron Unz launched a successful initiative against bilingual education. Reiner is far from a dilettante. Four years ago, encouraged by Tipper Gore, he began an intensive study of child-development policy. After consulting with experts, he launched his “I Am Your Child” foundation, produced a TV special on early brain development and promoted a federal bill that would have directed $11 billion of the tobacco settlement to children’s programs. Now he trudges from Rotary Clubs and newspaper editorial boards to the sets of Jay Leno and Roseanne promoting his ballot initiative. “I feel like the cavalry coming to the rescue,” says Reiner. “The tobacco industry can buy politicians, but our hope is they can’t buy the public.”