Since October, CNN has filled its 8 p.m. weeknight time slot with a program called Parker Spitzer, co-hosted by conservative columnist Kathleen Parker and infamously-humbled former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. The show seems virtually indistinguishable from other split-screen partisan debate-fests but for one novel, ratings-courting feature: unlike, say, Crossfire or Hannity and Colmes, Parker Spitzer happens to employ a man who, in 2008, undid years of populist crusading and election night triumphs with some “personal failings” of the hooker-in-a-hotel room variety.
America seems hesitant to redeem him. The show has followed its poor reviews into a distant fourth place standing in the ratings, and Bill O’Reilly counts six times as many viewers in the 25-to-54 demographic. Spitzer has reportedly offended CNN staffers and feuded behind the scenes with Parker and, even within the arm-wrestling tropes of basic-cable news commentary, he can’t quite figure out how to charm the viewing public.
Oddly, I’ve always found Spitzer, in his near-comical unlikability, sort of sympathetic. I remember a brief TMZ clip, posted shortly after his scandal, in which a paparazzo asked, “What are you doing, Governor? Working?” Spitzer, walking down a Manhattan sidewalk with a manila folder under his arm, flashed the sharp, toothy grin of a perpetual top student in class. “Always” he said.
Tall, thin and alienating, with angular features and a glaring bald spot, Spitzer once looked like a suitable political icon for those of us who prefer Paul McCartney to John Lennon. He seemed like a calculating rationalist who would just go into the studio and give the people their damn radio-friendly four-minute pop songs. Yet, he ended up becoming one of the most emotional characters in recent American public life.
As New York attorney general, he was known as “The Sheriff of Wall Street,” targeting corporate pay-packages and rescuing thousands of white-collar employees from top-skimming executives. His governorship began with one of the biggest landslide victories in state history and proceeded with characteristic flourish, including high-octane screaming matches with political rivals.
Now, like toe-sucking contemporary Dick Morris, Spitzer translates high-profile disgrace into basic-cable prominence. CNN executives don’t seem to consider his presence on their network prohibitively tacky, and so allow the Princeton and Harvard Law grad to interview the likes of James Carville and Dennis Rodman on a nightly basis, wisely providing him a co-host pleasant and respectable enough to offset his charmlessness.
His new television career is not predicated on money. Granted, CNN pays Spitzer about half a million a year. I’m sure countless Americans would deem this “Shameful,” and I won’t argue with them (mainly because I would feel redundant in calling the American mainstream “self-righteous”). But half a million is still only half-a-Van Susteren and it barely even registers in Spitzer’s world. His real estate mogul father is worth half a billion and Spitzer could probably challenge that figure himself in the private sector, where the objective tenets of free-market fundamentalism pay no heed to one’s personal scandals.
No, rather, Spitzer’s on-camera life coheres with a personality flaw that informed his trumpet-blaring political career and likely financed his therapist’s summerhouse in the Hamptons: he wants people to love him. This is a man who could have been Madoff, but wanted to be Elliot Ness; a trust-fund baby who warped himself into some kind of consumer-rights Robin Hood.
Parker Spitzer is currently the darkest show on television. Beneath its typical right-left current-events debate, it brims with the quiet emotional neediness of an alienated genius. An insecure honors student who won all the spelling bees but never got voted onto Prom Court. A guy who couldn’t even trust women to be intimate with him outside of the ice-cold context of bottom-line financial transactions.
Even out of office, Spitzer suffers from politico “Love Me Syndrome,” the very same disease that forces dual Harvard JD/MBA Mitt Romney to sputter off-putting “Who let the dogs out?” punchlines on primary campaign stops. The insidious virus responsible for Obama’s bowling score and Al Gore’s documentary and, during Iowa caucus season, for all the labored photo-ops lining the walls of Iowa City’s kitschy Hamburg Inn.
The public should reject Spitzer’s talk show not because it benefits an “immoral” man, but so as to liberate that man from his own longstanding pathology. Granting Wall Street’s hug-deprived ex-sheriff our attention now will only distract him from the serious, non-televised work to which he should be devoting his post-governorship. We should remove him from the TV Guide (where his last name now appears in the listings between Spongebob and WWE Raw) and put his brilliant, unlikable, philandering brain back into a high-powered policy position, where it belongs. Spitzer should retreat behind the cameras, manila folder under his arm, shrug off our collective opinion of him, and get back to work.
