“Busier than a one-armed paper hanger” is how Kathleen Parker describes herself these days. The apt phrase references a career spike that brought the scrappy Southern newsie from syndicated columnist to Pulitzer Prize winner to national TV journalist in just short of half a year.
“I’ve always been the girl-next-door columnist,” Parker says, adding, “My readers are what people in New York and Washington call ‘ordinary’ Americans,” she says, hastening to assure us that she has never once herself used that adjective to describe anyone who follows her maverick yet common-sense approach to the political conundrums of the day.
“I think that’s why CNN brought me in,” Parker says of her new job as the top-billed half of CNN’s Parker Spitzer, a news and political chat show that debuted Oct. 4 in the boutique spot at 8 p.m. on weeknights. “As a voice for the people who don’t feel well-represented. The over-50 crowd in Arizona deserves to have a voice on TV too.”
But make no mistake about it, though the CNN gig came somewhat out of the blue and albeit on the tails of her grabbing the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary this year, Parker’s meteoric rise was hardly an accident. The woman was never what you’d call a slacker before she landed at the CNN television studio in Manhattan’s posh Time Warner Center in June, or in the Beltway as a syndicated Washington Post writer by way of the Tribune Company four years earlier for that matter.
Parker is one of the most widely read syndicated columnists in America, printed twice weekly in more than 400 publications across the land, just not necessarily in markets served by major dailies such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, which tend to have their own stable of columnists and where Parker is not exactly a household word.
So when the woman who got her start in the newspaper trenches of the Orlando Sentinel in 1987, where her column went into syndication in 1995, got to the “bubble” that is Washington, D.C., nobody had heard of her despite 15 years of developing a loyal readership among people who read papers like The Kansas City Star and the Biloxi Sun Herald. Even though, as she said at the time, “you’d have to stand in line to get a ticket to see me in Oklahoma City.”
These down-home roots coupled with Parker’s connection with that base may be at the heart of the dynamic CNN was shooting for in her unlikely conjoining with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, whose fall from grace, while not exactly out of the ordinary as political scandals go, puts him very much in the slick Northeasterner camp.
Spitzer, still derisively referred to as “Client 9” in some circles, was forced to step down as governor after admitting to a liaison with a high-paid prostitute. Sharing the forum with him nightly, Parker admits, gave her some initial pause.
“When CNN came to me about this, I said I’d have to talk it over with my husband and sons, and they would have to cast the deciding vote. [Spitzer] is not the first man who has sinned this way, and as far as I’m concerned that’s between him and his wife, Silda, whom I have met and who is really wonderful.
“But I still had to get to know Eliot first. He is a devoted father who is always running off to school board meetings for his three daughters — and he’s gone through a few rounds in hell over this. I am one of those people who believes in redemption, but still, if I didn’t like him and I didn’t think he had important things to say, I wouldn’t be able to do this.”
In awarding Parker its honor, the Pulitzer Prize committee cited not only her humor, but her often “unpredictable conclusions.” And it’s the independent spirit of the “self-described conservative” and author of the 2008 book Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care, in which she laments the demeaning of men in our society, that has frustrated certain conservatives from day one. It was in September of ’08 that Parker crossed that line, writing a column in which, while admiring Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin as a different kind of feminist icon, an “antithesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood,” concluded ultimately that Palin was out of her league and should step down from the ticket — for her country’s sake.
For the record, Parker swears, “I got invited to zero cocktail parties as a result of that column.”
“I’ve never been a [political] party person,” Parker contends. “If a Democrat has a good idea, I’ll agree, and if a Republican says something stupid, I’ll say so. I have always been my own person and spoken for myself, and it turned out that a few million people happened to agree with me, and, guess what, they still do.” Which may find the Parker Spitzer co-hosts agreeing as much as they disagree in a format that aims to bring different people together and working to bridge differences and come up with solutions, unlike legendary CNN pundit-fest Crossfire, which pitted left- and right-leaning minds against each other in an often-cantankerous setting.
It’s also a great departure from her column writing, “because someone like me who has always worked alone and had a lot of time to think, TV is not that way at all. It is a collaborative effort. There’s a lot of discussion with staff and you have to think on your feet. I can’t bury myself in the basement for five hours.”
For now, Parker will continue to write her column twice a week and maintain her digs in D.C. “I’m a reporter, so I want to keep my presence in Washington, because let’s face it, what we’re talking about on the show is happening there.
“I will still be popping my head into offices on the Hill.”
And as for her new office in Columbus Circle — “It’s nothing fancy, just a work space, but I do have a walk-in closet now.”
All of which means her husband will be commuting from their home in Camden, S.C., where they raised three sons (two are her stepsons) and he still practices law, to what is now their third residence on Manhattan’s East Side. “I think I’m going to have to get up earlier.” Parker concludes. I pretty much at this point have a 25-hour workday, and I wear a lot more makeup.”
Parker and Spitzer have stepped up to the plate in CNN’s effort to improve its lagging ratings in the most competitive time slot of all. Campbell Brown exited gracefully from it because the Nielsen ratings last spring showed her attracting a mere 591,000 viewers, while Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC averaged 1.03 million and The O’Reilly Factor on Fox pulled in 3.34 million.
“The metaphor we keep using is a dinner party that you want to be invited to every night. You want your conversations to be interesting and provocative,” Parker says.
“We all want our friends to be smart and funny, which is what Eliot and I want from our guests.”
“We are both using our own Rolodexes — which I guess dates us — and we want people to sit down and talk about the events of the day and viewers to feel like they are in good company.”
As originally published in Newsmax magazine.
