Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker is a "conservative," while disgraced former governor Eliot Spitzer is merely a "Democrat," according to reporters Bill Carter and Brian Stelter on the front of Thursday morning's Business Day section [1] discussing CNN's new Spitzer-Parker political chat show (don't call it the return of "Crossfire"):
Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York, will formally re-emerge in the fall as a television personality, hosting a new prime-time discussion program on CNN.
The news network announced on Wednesday that Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat, would be joined by Kathleen Parker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist for The Washington Post.
In an interview with the Times, Parker certainly sounded like someone who would roll their eyes at a Tea Party rally:
Ms. Parker, who has described herself as a "rational conservative," said the new show would have evident points of view, but, "We'll slow it down" and provide insight rather than noise. She will continue to write her column.
In a telephone interview on Wednesday, she defined that more specifically. "I am pro-life," she said. "But I don't go around carrying a fetus in a jar. Some people on the right have been out there and on the extreme." She said she and Mr. Spitzer - who called himself "a pragmatic liberal" - would encourage intelligent discussion without ideological bombast. "We will push each other to change views," Mr. Spitzer said.
The Times also counted Parker among the "conservative intellectual elite" in a recent profile [2] of a D.C. garden party.
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