Americans already know far more about Eliot Spitzer than they probably want to. But Kathleen Parker, co-host with the former New York governor in a new CNN show that debuts Monday night, is something of a mystery.
Despite Parker’s recent Pulitzer and a widely-syndicated column, the name recognition gap is sizeable enough that Parker teasingly called Spitzer out for it during a joint appearance on “Larry King Live” last week to promote their new show, “Parker Spitzer.”
“You didn’t ask him what he thought when he heard it was me,” she said to King, talking about the show’s origins. “He’d never heard of me.”
Spitzer protested, though not particularly convincingly.
But the exchange showed the extent to which Parker wears her outsider status like a badge – or, more accurately, like a string of Southern lady’s pearls. (In a recent column about having moved, for the show, from Camden, S.C., to New York, she described herself as “a smallish-town girl come to the humongous city,” who looked on the bureaucracy required for high-density living as “a fresh sort of hell.”)
And no wonder. It has been essential to her rapid rise over the past five years.
Having spent most of her life in the South, the 59-year-old Parker has honed in her columns a highly literary but folksy bluntness that works best when taking on the excesses of feminism and the coastal elites. Wrapped up in this contrarian posture are many conservative ideas — about the role of women in combat, for instance, or the dangers of federal government overreach in healthcare – that have helped brand her as a conservative.
But she has no particular coziness with Republican power structures (and in fact, as she told King, is not a registered Republican), and wrote her most famous column calling Sarah Palin “clearly out of her league” and calling for her to step down from the GOP vice presidential ticket in 2008.
That the Pulitzer Prize followed so soon afterwards was hardly a coincidence, Parker herself suggested in a call-in on “Morning Joe” the morning after her win last April. “It’s only because I’m a conservative basher that I’m now recognized after 23 years of toiling in the fields, right?”
Growing up in Winter Haven, Fla., Kathleen O’Connor was the daughter of a World War II bomber pilot who became an attorney and then, after Kathleen’s mother died when she was three, a serial husband, marrying four more times.
“I was primarily raised by him in a male environment, or a male-rich environment,” she says. “I knew how to do guy things, like shoot a gun. It was a pretty no-frills life, and my dad worried that I didn’t know enough about my feminine side.”
Politically, Parker describes a “classically liberal environment,” though her brother Jack O’Connor, who fought as a Marine in Vietnam, describes their father as “a staunch conservative.”
This difference may speak to the way these political categories have shifted over the past two generations.
“We were Kennedy Democrats. My dad was very involved in advancing civil rights for African Americans,” Parker says, adding that “the emphasis growing up was self-sufficiency, tending your own garden and small government.”
Parker’s original career plan was to become a Spanish professor, but after a stint in graduate school she started on a career as a reporter at the now-defunct Charleston Evening Post. Subsequent jobs at the Florida Times-Union, Birmingham Post-Herald and San Jose Mercury News took her all over the country. She married a photojournalist, whose last name she still retains, and had a son.
When she was young Parker describes herself as having been “very liberal,” but like many people in her generation, she says she lost this ideology with age. Though for her it happened in an instant, on Sept. 3, 1984.
“I became conservative when my first child was born,” she says. “It was just like that.”
“It was a great practical joke God played on me,” she says. “He had given me a boy. I had been a fairly doctrinaire feminist up to that point. I started seeing the world through boys’ eyes, and I didn’t like what I saw. So I started questioning a lot of the things I called truth through my college years.”
Her big break came in 1987, when she was hired by the features desk of the Orlando Sentinel and given her own column. It was called “Women,” to balance out the paper’s other column, “Men, ” but men – and gender – guided the column and eventually culminated in her 2008 book, “Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care.”
The book argues that feminism has gone too far and created a culture that is hostile to men, in which young boys have to be pumped full of Ritalin just to sit still through elementary school classes disproportionately taught by (probably feminist) women, and men find themselves ridiculed on sitcoms and discriminated against in family court.
It was Saundra Keyes, the Sentinel’s features editor at the time, who suggested Parker try column writing.
“When you put together how smart she was with how distinctive her writing voice was – it was a distinct pattern of thought as well as a distinctive writing voice – it just seemed like she should try her and at a column, and she was a real natural,” says Keyes.
And, Keyes recalls, there was nothing particularly conservative about her columns. In fact, years later, when she was the editorial page editor at the Honolulu Advertiser, she was looking for a conservative voice for the editorial page, and heard colleagues suggest Parker.
“It thought it must be a different Kathleen Parker,” Keyes says. “I would never have thought of her with that label, or, to be honest, any other label. One of the things that I’ve always admired of her work was that she’s not predictable.”
The same year she started her column, she also remarried, this time to an attorney, Woody Cleveland, who had two sons of his own and a law practice in Camden, S.C., where she relocated.
Her column was eventually syndicated and ran in 350 papers, but after her own son went off to college in 2003, she decided it was time to “turn up the heat” on her career. She got an apartment in Washington, splitting her time between there and Camden, and eventually signed on with The Washington Post Writers Group.
“I’m a reporter at heart,” she says. “I like being where the action is. I can’t help it. I put my career on simmer for all the years I was helping boys grow up, so I wanted to turn up the heart. I asked my husband if he’d have any objection to my going to Washington. My husband’s a little older than I am, and a certified grown-up and very secure in his identity. It’s not like he needed me to be there for him when he came home from work every night.”
Now Parker has joined a different kind of club entirely, and she’s clearly a bit ambivalent about it. After years of freelancing with only the most remote connections to the media institutions that sent her paychecks, she’s joined the hulking bureaucracy of CNN.
“Not only did I move from a small town in South Carolina via a relatively quiet neighborhood in Washington, I also left a solo writing operation to join CNN, an international organization with layers upon layers of human management,” she wrote in her Sept. 29th column. “Not that I'm complaining. Just sayin'.”
She got a taste of the darker side of those layers of human management a little more than a week before her show launched when Jon Klein, the CNN/U.S President who had wooed her and convinced her that co-hosting a show with a disgraced former governor was a good idea, was summarily fired in what many industry insiders initially interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the show. (Though she says CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton has assured her that this is not the case.)
On her desk in New York last weekend were two books that gave a hint of what “Parker Spitzer” will be like: a new book on the tea party by New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, and a memoir of New Orleans by Julia Reed. A voice from the Eastern establishment and a voice from the South.
This dynamic, more than a “Crossfire”-like left-right one, will likely drive the show.
“I’m a conservative centrist and Eliot is a liberal centrist,” says Parker. “Centrist is big. Extreme is small. So there’s this vast section where most of us live our lives, and I think most Americans relate to that more than to the extremes.”
POLITICO
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