Signup for email updates
News Article
April 2, 2006
Los Angeles Daily News and San Francisco Chronicle
No scandal in Reiner's spending
by Syndicated columnist Jill Stewart
NEWS flash: Scandal has emerged on a state commission that bought TV ads to convince Californians not to smoke, because the ads ran while some commissioners were finishing up a petition drive to broaden California's fight to save lives by reducing smoking. Political journalists were outraged at the double duty played by the commission. At a Sacramento Press Club event, they pilloried the Commission Against Smoking for using $23 million from its voter-approved ad budget to spread the “propaganda that smoking kills.”
The state is investigating, since it is illegal to use public funds for political campaigns. Critics charge that the anti-smoking ads, though not directly promoting the signature-gathering effort, might have helped by causing people to fear smoking.
Now, tell the truth. Can you imagine a real news story (the above news flash being my own fabrication) that took this attitude?
Not in a million years. Not in California. The media would bend over backward to pooh-pooh any inadvertent appearance of misusing public funds. The politicians would attack Big Tobacco and rush to the beleaguered commission's side.
Yet this is the case being made hysterically so against the First 5 California Children and Families Commission, created by voters to spend billions of dollars on the health and education needs of California's increasingly disadvantaged preschoolers.
Chairing the commission until his resignation a few days ago was film director Rob Reiner, an exceedingly rare example of a Hollywood big name who decided to put in some big-time elbow grease for the larger good instead of hanging around Morton's eating canapés and blathering about how awful things are in Iraq.
Unlike the journalists and politicians who hectored Reiner out of his position a few days ago, Reiner spent much of the past decade educating himself about the demographic time bomb we face if California does not help its vast population of small children thrive.
I don't know Reiner and probably don't agree with most of his liberal Democratic views. However, when it comes to California's growing toddler disaster children so neglected and behind that they show up at kindergarten unable to name their crayon colors or count to 10 on their fingers I've been impressed by Reiner.
While Hollywood types blame crime, illiteracy and ignorance on somebody else, Reiner put in thousands of hours to create an unprecedented, voter-approved infrastructure to improve the “first 5” years of life for the tiniest Californians. For his troubles, Reiner has been demonized by Sacramento's anti-reform, me-first politicians and cynical, all-knowing “gotcha!” journalists, neither of whom gives a rip if our preschoolers sink or swim.
These two insider groups have an ugly history of demonizing big ideas. They fanatically opposed Proposition 227 (English-language immersion in the schools), and are still bitterly attacking Proposition 13 (the 1978 property-tax revolt). The utterly unsubstantiated accusation against the First 5 Commission is that it wrongly spent $23 million from its legally allotted, voter-approved, 6 percent public-advertising budget on a TV campaign telling California's scads of unengaged parents that preschool is good. How dare they?
If First 5 is guilty of anything, it is for its stupidity in launching its important $23 million public-education effort just as Reiner's separate Proposition 82 measure to provide universal preschool by taxing the rich was gathering final signatures.
Journalists and politicians called it a “scandal,” implying that Proposition 82's signature-gathering, which ended in early November, was somehow helped by the TV education effort.
How absurd. At the time, Proposition 82 enjoyed a cushy $2 million budget and voters were happily signing the latest petition drive to tax the rich. Don't get me wrong. I view singling out the rich as a backward, anti-democratic tax strategy, so I'm torn about Proposition 82. Yet we desperately need free preschool in our increasingly Third World state, given our porous border with Mexico, or we are lost.
These are legitimate, if wonky, issues. Journalists and Sacramento politicians need to address them. Instead, in a slow news year, Reiner offered these two groups an easy way to manufacture a self-promoting controversy.
When I Googled “Rob Reiner” and “preschool” and “scandal,” I got 15,800 items. We should all be ashamed.
In the end, California, facing an endless influx of poor immigrants and grossly under-educated children, has hounded out of civic life a Hollywood icon who broke with the Morton's crowd to put his time where his mouth is. I feel so proud.