Kathleen Parker is a center-right columnist for The Washington Post. Her columns are syndicated nationally and appear in more than 400 media outlets, both online and in print. Parker is a consulting faculty member at the Buckley School of Public Speaking, a popular guest on cable and network news programs and a regular guest on NBC's "Meet the Press" and MSNBC's "Hardball". Parker describes herself politically as "mostly right of center" and was the highest-scoring conservative pundit in a 2012 retrospective study of pundit prediction accuracy in 2008. Parker urged the 2016 Electoral Collegeelectors to be "unfaithful" to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States.
Early life and career
Parker was raised in Winter Haven in Polk County, Florida. She is the daughter of lawyer J. Hal Connor and mother, Martha, originally from Barnwell County, South Carolina, who died when Parker was aged 3. Parker often spent summers with her mother's family in Columbia, South Carolina. Parker's career in journalism began in 1977 when she was hired to cover Hanahan, Goose Creek and Moncks Corner by the now-defunct Charleston Evening Post. A columnist since 1987, she has worked for five newspapers, from Florida to California. She has written for several magazines, including The Weekly Standard, Time, Town & Country, Cosmopolitan, and Fortune Small Business. She serves on the Board of Contributors for USA Todays Forum Page, part of the newspaper's Opinion section. She is also a contributor to the online magazineThe Daily Beast. Parker is the author of Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care. From fall 2010, Parker co-hosted the cable news programParker Spitzer on CNN with former New York governorEliot Spitzer. Parker was the 1993 winner of the H. L. Mencken Writing Award presented by The Baltimore Sun. The Week magazine named her one of the nation's top five columnists in 2004 and 2005. She won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for a selection of political opinion columns. Parker wrote about the April 2019 arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London comparing him unfavorably to the "historic act of bravery" by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers about American government lies in the Vietnam War. Assange's "non-fans — including many in the U.S. media — long have viewed him as a sociopathic interloper operating under the protection of free speech."
Controversies
During the 2008 U.S. presidential election Parker called on the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Governor Sarah Palin, to step down from the party ticket, saying that a series of media interviews showed that Palin was "clearly out of her league". Parker received over 11,000 responses, mostly from conservatives critical of her opinion. During the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh nomination to be a justice of the United States Supreme Court, Parker wrote a column advancing the theory that the alleged victim, Christine Blasey Ford, was mistaken in her identification of Brett Kavanaugh, and that there must be a Kavanaugh doppelgänger. The doppelgänger theory was denounced as ludicrous and madness by multiple other Washington Post columnists, such as Max Boot, Erik Wemple, Jennifer Rubin, E. J. Dionne, and Avi Selk.
Personal life
Parker is married to an attorney, Woody Cleveland, has one son and two stepsons, and resides in Camden, South Carolina.
