On Thursday's Parker-Spitzer, CNN's Eliot Spitzer lashed out at
President Obama from the left, going so far as to accuse him of
forfeiting his campaign promises, simultaneously attacking the Tea Party
movement in the process: "
He...l
et the Tea Party- one of the most vapid, puerile groups out there, without meaningful ideas- take over those voices for transformation, and
now, he is embracing their agenda."
Spitzer led the 8 pm Eastern hour with his critique of Obama naming
William Daley to be his next White House chief of staff: "You know, I
don't think anybody is going to view Bill Daley as the enemy. I think
everybody agrees that Bill Daley is an honorable guy...The problem I
have with this is that Bill Daley, ideologically, is simply not what
this president ran on....
This is no longer change you can believe in....This
is somebody who has been a senior executive at Morgan Chase- no longer
the concerns of the middle class, no longer carrying the banner that got
him elected."
On the other hand, Kathleen Parker, his pseudo-conservative co-host,
waxed ecstatic about the Daley nomination, and made it clear that she is
still a
"big fan" of the President:
PARKER: I think what is most appealing to me about this pick...is that
Obama did not go for his ideological twin. He actually picked someone
who might challenge him. This is very Lincoln-esque- I
would think that you'd be- find that appealing- that he's going to
surround himself with people who don't necessarily agree with everything
he thinks and who are not going to reinforce every thought he has, but
challenge him.
The former Democratic governor of New York didn't buy this and continued expressing his extreme disappointment in Obama:
SPITZER: The problem is nobody knows anymore what Barack Obama thinks, and I think what Barack Obama has done is make himself an empty vessel once again.
Because he was so passive over the last two years, failing to
articulate a rationale for what should have been transformation, he
ceded the entire political landscape and let the Tea Party- one of the
most vapid, puerile groups out there, without meaningful ideas- take
over those voices for transformation, and now, he is embracing their
agenda, rather than standing up and saying, this is what I
believe in. And I think that is why people are gasping, saying- wait a
minute: Bill Daley is a wonderful guy. Nobody will speak ill of him as a
person (Parker laughs), but ideology matters. Politics is about
ideology, and either this president knows how to stand up and fight for
it, or he doesn't, and if he doesn't, then why will people care about
whether it's him or George Bush. And frankly, people are beginning not
to care, and that's a problem.
One wonders what kind of far-left fantasy land Spitzer is living in if
he thinks the President is "embracing" the agenda of the Tea Party
movement.
Parker replied to her co-host's rant with a crack: "
The terrible
irony of all of this is that you are making a case that many
Republicans made from the very beginning, that Barack Obama did not know
what he really stood for."
Spitzer's blast at the chief executive is a drastic change of tone for him, as just over two weeks ago, he was
defending the Democrat's record on education by making the false claim that "President Obama has done everything to push the agenda for choice in schools."
-Matthew Balan is a news analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here.
