Kathleen Parker

Kathleen Parker is a politically conservative-leaning 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 shows and a regular panelist on NBC's "Meet the Press" and MSNBC's "Hardball" with Chris Matthews. 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 College electors to be "unfaithful" to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States.

Parker's journalism career started 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 Today's Forum Page, part of the newspaper's Opinion section. She is also a contributor to the online magazine The Daily Beast. Parker is the author of Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care.

Starting in the fall of 2010, Parker co-hosted the cable news program Parker Spitzer on CNN with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. In 2011 she left the show to focus more on her writing.

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 made news during the 2008 U.S. presidential election when she 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 criticizing her.

Parker grew up in Winter Haven in Polk County, Florida. Daughter of lawyer J. Hal Connor and mother, Martha, originally from Barnwell County South Carolina, who died when Parker was just 3. Parker often spent summers with her mother's family in Columbia, South Carolina.

She is married to an attorney, Woody Cleveland, has one son and two stepsons, and resides in Camden, South Carolina.