undermined

Robert Redford looked like he walked out of the sea to become a Hollywood god. He was physically flawless. Pacific blue eyes, salt-bleached hair, a friendly surfer-boy squint. Born in Santa Monica to a milkman and a housewife, his first memory was of sliding off his mother’s lap at the Aero Theatre as a toddler and running toward the light, causing such a ruckus that the projectionist had to stop the film.

He definitely grew up to grab the movies’ attention. He wasn’t just telegenic but talented, although that wasn’t a requirement for stardom when he emerged in the late ’50s when the industry was scooping up hunks like him by the bucket for television and B-movies. All a male ingenue needed to do was smile and kiss the girl. It would have been so easy to do that a couple times and wind up doing it forever. You can understand why so many forgotten actors made that deal, without realizing that forever can lead to a fast retirement.

But if Redford had sensed at 2 years old that he was meant to be onscreen, by his 20s, he insisted he’d only do it on his own terms. At 27, with nearly zero name recognition, he horrified his then-agent by turning down a $10,000-a-week TV gig as a strait-laced psychiatrist to do a Mike Nichols theater production for just $110. His rejection of the easy money was an unusual choice, particularly for a cash-strapped father of two.

To appreciate Redford fully, we have to applaud not only the work he did but the simple, feel-good roles he rejected. He could have become a celebrity without breaking a sweat as the war hero, the jock, the husband, the cowboy, the American ideal made incarnate. Yet, he had the rare ability to sidestep what audiences thought we wanted from him to instead give us something we didn’t know we needed: selfish victors (“Downhill Racer”), self-destructive veterans (“The Great Waldo Pepper”) and tragic men who did everything right and still failed (2013’s “All Is Lost”).

In spirit, Redford never strayed far from the teen rebel he’d been — a truant who’d skipped school, stole booze and crashed race cars — and the radical artist he hurled himself into becoming by quitting everything traditional (the football team, his fraternity, college altogether) to move to Paris where he took up oil painting and marched against the Soviets. He might have excelled at the sleazy roles that made Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino famous. On the outside, he knew they didn’t fit, either.

Sometimes Redford said no even when I wish he’d have said yes. Imagine if he’d agreed to face off against Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Instead, he told Nichols he’d rather tangle with Anne Bancroft in “The Graduate,” only to be rejected as too handsome for the role. “Can you honestly imagine a guy like you having difficulty seducing a woman?” Nichols told him.

Instead, Redford used his all-American good looks to make us question our flattering image of ourselves. In the 1974 adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” he was the first person you’d think of to play the title role because he fully understood the point of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book — how it felt to represent our country’s whole image of success while knowing it’s a phony put-on. I imagine him making a devil’s bargain with his face, vowing that he won’t hide behind goofy accents and stunt wigs the way other too-handsome oddballs do, if he’s allowed to use his appeal like a Trojan horse.

If there’s one thing that unites his roles, from 1966’s “The Chase” to “Lions for Lambs,” it’s his willingness to give the screen his full charisma — to let audiences stare at him for the whole running time of a movie — as long as we’ll agree to ask what’s lurking in his underbelly. Most often, we’ll find frustrated idealism just at the moment it starts to sour.

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The films of the 1960s and ’70s that made Redford an icon mostly cleave into two categories: scamps and truth-seekers. (The latter can overlap with suckers and stooges.) His antihero crooks in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “The Sting” captured something in our national id, our not-so-secret belief that it’s OK to break a few rules to get ahead — that we can forgive a sin if we like the sinner. I like how those movies give you a guilty little tingle about rooting for Redford even when it means scratching off a couple of the Ten Commandments. (Thou shalt not steal unless you’re Robert Redford, who got away with it all the way through 2018’s “The Old Man and the Gun.”)

Lately, the Redford roles I’ve been thinking about are the ones where his all-American appeal makes us examine all of America, good and bad. The two that instantly jump to mind are his pair of political thrillers: “Three Days of the Condor,” in which he plays a CIA agent on the run from his own co-workers, and “All the President’s Men,” in which he doggedly uncovers the Watergate scandal. Both films believe in the power of getting the truth out to the press; neither is so naive as to think the truth alone will save the day.

But let’s not overlook “The Candidate,” a movie that has Redford as underqualified political scion Bill McKay, pressed to run for governor of California. “He’s not going to get his ass kicked — he’s cute,” his father (Melvyn Douglas) says. Meanwhile, his own campaign team cares more about the length of his sideburns than ideas in his head. Released in 1972, five years into former actor Ronald Reagan’s own governorship, the movie hammers home that superficiality might be democracy’s downfall — and the stakes are bigger than who is Hollywood‘s latest heartthrob.

Vice President Dan Quayle once said “The Candidate” inspired him, triggering its screenwriter Jeremy Larner to dash this off in an op-ed: “Mr. Quayle, this was not a how-to movie, it was a watch-out movie. And you are what we should be watching out for!”

In his later years, Redford became a filmmaker himself and I can picture him pulling Brad Pitt aside on the set of “A River Runs Through It” to whisper: You don’t have to stay in that pretty–boy box. Feel free to get weird. As an actor and director, Redford continued to create characters who uncovered our our hidden rot, whether in our purported national pastime, baseball (“The Natural”), or in our actual one, watching television (“Quiz Show”). His turn in “Indecent Proposal” as the wealthy man who offers to rent his employee’s wife lives on as shorthand for tycoons who assume they can buy whatever, and whoever, they want. When he eventually signed on for a superhero film, it was, fittingly, alongside Captain America, that upright paragon of virtue — and Redford played the villain.

What Quayle missed about “The Candidate” is that when it comes to a Robert Redford movie, truth is never as plain as what your eyes can see. There’s always a deeper level and there’s no guarantee that justice would win. In fact, I’d argue in Redford’s films, it rarely does.

United States President Donald Trump’s big tax and spending bill has faced backlash from both Democrats and fiscal hawks in his own party. But one proposal that has received rare bipartisan support from the start — eliminating taxes on tips.

The Senate bill passed on Tuesday, which mirrors the House bill passed last month, would deliver this campaign promise from Trump and had also been proposed by his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris.

The House plan lets workers deduct all reported tips from their taxable income, while the Senate version sets limits — $18,500 for individuals or $25,000 for joint filers — and phases it out for higher earners. The tax break would expire at the end of 2028.

If this bill passes, filers could deduct some or all of those tips starting in 2026.

Economists forecast that cutting tax on tips could increase the federal deficits by $100bn over the next decade.

Many restaurant workers continue to earn the federal tipped minimum wage, or subminimum wage, of just $2.13 per hour nationally. It is slightly higher in places like New York at $3.55 per hour. The law assumes that tips will bridge the gap to reach the $7.25 federal minimum wage.

A survey cited by the White House and conducted by a fintech firm found that 83 percent of restaurant workers support a no-tax-on-tips policy. Trump’s plan has been endorsed by the National Restaurant Association.

“The inclusion of the No Tax on Tips and No Tax on Overtime provisions recognises the value of our dedicated workforce. More than two million tipped servers and bartenders stand to benefit, while the overtime measure rewards the commitment of over 13 million hourly team members across the sector,” Michelle Korsmo, president and CEO of the National Restaurant Association, told Al Jazeera in a statement.

The bill at the surface promises to put more money in the pockets of servers, bartenders, and other tipped workers. But it has been criticised by worker-centric advocacy groups and restaurant workers themselves, who caution against embracing it too quickly because it also comes with cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, which workers in the restaurant industry disproportionately rely on.

“That is like one of like the biggest fears I have right now. I rely on SNAP myself. I rely on Medicaid. At one point, I didn’t have insurance because of the whole sub-minimum wage, ” Jessica Ordenana, a server at a Chili’s Restaurant in Queens, New York told Al Jazeera.

According to One Fair Wage, about 66 percent of tipped workers in the US don’t earn enough to pay federal income tax, so eliminating tax on tips wouldn’t help the majority of restaurant workers.

To put this in perspective, a worker earning $2.13 per hour, working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, would earn just $4,430.40 annually. Employers are legally required to make up the difference if tips don’t bring workers to $7.25/hour, totalling $15,078 per year. Federal income taxes must be paid by those who make more than $14,600 annually. Many workers still fall short due to inconsistent schedules and unreliable tipping.

Work requirements complications

Restaurant tipped workers overwhelmingly rely on services like SNAP and Medicaid, and will now face new work requirements to get them.

For instance, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” includes a Medicaid work requirement that obligates able-bodied adults aged 19 to 64 to work at least 80 hours per month to remain eligible.

For many restaurant workers, this is simply not feasible. Not because of unwillingness, but because their hours depend on consumer demand.

According to Harvard Kennedy School’s The Shift Project, which studies workplace trends, one in five service sector workers reported having not as many hours as they would like and saw a 34 percent fluctuation in the number of hours week to week.

“I’m actually having a hard time at Chili’s because they went from giving me my full like four or five days a week, to now just one day a week. It really varies week to week,” Ordenana said.

“When I ask for another day on the schedule [the manager] tells me, yeah, yeah sure. And then they don’t even put me on the schedule. So last week, I didn’t work at all,”  Ordenana said.

Demand for eating out has started to slump as Americans tighten purse strings in the face of a slowing economy and uncertainty over the impact of Trump’s tariffs.

Consumer Price Index data showed that spending on eating out was flat for three months from February to April and has started to decline heading into the middle of the year.

Consumer spending is projected to drop by 7 percent over the middle of the year, according to KPMG’s Consumer Pulse report.

As a result, One Fair Wage estimates that 45 percent of restaurant workers currently enrolled in Medicaid could lose their health insurance because of the possible downturn in hours because of slumping demand.

“More tipped restaurant workers would lose their Medicaid than would gain small tax benefits. This is not the right solution,” Saru Jayaraman, founder of the advocacy group One Fair Wage told Al Jazeera.

“Why are these workers on Medicaid to begin with? Because they earn a sub-minimum wage and can’t afford to take care of themselves.”

SNAP benefits face a similar threat. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, forecasts that the tax bill could lead to as many as 11 million people, including restaurant workers, losing access to critical benefits. The House bill would cut $300bn from SNAP over the next 10 years and the Senate bill would cut $211bn.

“Those cuts have to come out of benefits or eligibility. There is just no way that cuts to administrative costs, to streamline waste, fraud, and abuse, or whatever the talking points are about thinking. Those are benefits to eligible people. To achieve that kind of savings, you have to cut benefits to people. There’s no way around it. And that’s devastating,” Ed Bolen, director of SNAP State Strategies at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Al Jazeera.

Nationwide, 18 percent of restaurant workers rely on SNAP benefits, including Ordenana.

“How am I going to eat? How am I gonna survive? How am I going to pay rent? And then on top of that, I might lose benefits? How is this happening in America?”  Ordenana asked rhetorically.

The Newsom for President bandwagon hit another rut this week.

A new poll by the L.A. Times and UC Berkeley found California’s registered voters believe — by a margin of more than 2 to 1 — the state’s gallivanting governor is more focused on boosting his chances of winning the White House than fixing the multitude of problems facing him here at home.

Which is not great news if you believe the best credential when seeking a new job is high praise for the one you’re doing.

Those surveyed were decidedly mixed on Newsom, with a tepid 46% approving of his performance in his second and final term. (Presumably few, if any of them, have listened to Newsom’s unctuous political podcast.) The same percentage of registered voters said they disapprove of his job performance.

That’s not a great look compared with other Democratic governors swirling about the 2028 gossip mill.

Pennsylvania voters give their chief executive, Josh Shapiro, a healthy 59% approval rating and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer gets favorable marks from 54% of her constituents. Kentucky’s Andy Beshear boasts a positively gaudy 68% approval rating in his deep-red state, the highest of any Democratic governor in the country, according to Morning Consult’s nationwide survey.

Of course, Newsom insists he’s not even thinking about running for president, though a simple application of the duck test — if it waddles and quacks like a duck, you can be reasonably certain of its waterfowl status — suggests otherwise.

In a recent interview with video podcaster Mark Halperin, the governor insisted he’s more undecided about a 2028 run than people think.

“I have to have a burning why, and I have to have a compelling vision that distinguishes myself from anybody else. Without that, without both … I don’t deserve to even be in the conversation,” Newsom said.

All the while very purposefully thrusting himself into the conversation — which is sort of like someone stripping naked, standing in a department store window, then asking why everyone is staring.

But whatever.

The good news for Newsom is that California voters probably won’t have an opportunity to weigh in on his presidential candidacy, should he run, until well into the nominating contest. Come March 7, 2028 — the date currently set for the state’s presidential primary — California will almost certainly continue its 50-plus years of having very little bearing on the outcome.

Maybe next century.

The full 2028 political calendar has yet to be determined. In 2024, Democrats shook things up at the behest of President Biden, eliminating their kickoff caucuses in Iowa and pushing South Carolina and Nevada to the fore. More changes may be coming, though New Hampshire, which has held the first presidential primary for more than a century, may very well hang on to its lead-off spot, which might not be a bad thing for Newsom.

Jim Demers, a lobbyist in Concord — the state capital — and a longtime Democratic activist, said California’s governor stands as decent a shot as any Democrat thinking of running.

“Whether it’s Gavin Newsom, or [Illinois Gov.] JB Pritzker, or Shapiro or Whitmer or [New Jersey Sen. Cory] Booker — whoever — people are ready to hear them out and want to see who’s going to really be willing to take Trump on and stand up,” said Demers, who’s so far neutral in the contest.

Newsom, he said, is “pretty much a blank slate” in New Hampshire. “The average person really doesn’t know that much about him, other than they know of him.”

What’s more, Demers doesn’t see Newsom’s California return address as necessarily a detriment.

“You probably will have Republicans who’ll paint a California candidate as being a lefty liberal,” Demer said. “But I think you have a lot of Democrats … who look at many of the policies that have occurred in California and see them as maybe progressive, but forward thinking.”

Dick Harpootlian is certainly no Republican. He’s a former South Carolina Democratic Party chairman, state senator and veteran of decades of presidential politics.

His tongue is sharp and pungent, like the vinegar-pepper barbecue sauce favored in parts of his state and — though, he too, has no early favorite — Harpootlian had little good to say about California’s governor, or his 2028 prospects.

“I think Gavin Newsom is what all of us think of when we think of a slick, wealthy California playboy kind of guy,” Harpootlian said from his law office in Columbia. “I mean, his hair is perfectly coiffed. His shoes are shiny, and probably Italian.

“Many of us,” he went on, “remember during COVID when he was telling everybody not to go out and he was having a fabulous dinner at the French Laundry in Napa. I just think he’s out of touch with the blue-collar folks we need to get back in the [Democratic] Party.

Nor, Harpootlian suggested, is California a particularly good place to hail from politically. He cited the state’s “huge homeless population,” its tent cities, looming budget deficit and taxes that “are so freaking high.”

“It’s not,” he said dryly, “a model the rest of the country wants to follow.”

Iowa has probably lost forevermore its privileged place on the political calendar after the disastrous 2020 caucuses, which took days to yield a winner.

Still, Democratic strategist Jeff Link has a practiced eye from observing scores of presidential candidates pass through over the years. He worked for half a dozen of them.

“I don’t think 2024 helped the California cause,” Link said of the chances Democrats would turn, after Kamala Harris, to another San Francisco-bred Democrat, as their nominee. “But I don’t think it’s a death sentence.”

Newsom might arrive in Iowa toting some baggage. (Assuming he shows up as a presidential hopeful.) But “there is real credibility in governing a state of that magnitude, even if it’s seen as too liberal and too quirky at times,” Link said from Des Moines. “I think people would be open to learning more.”

Which suggests a Newsom tilt at the White House is not entirely far-fetched.

Assuming he first gets his own house in order.