Rumor has it that Eliot Spitzer is negotiating to take over the timeslot vacated by Campbell Brown for a Crossfire-style opinion show. By the laws of cable news symmetry, this means he’d get a conservative co-host — possibly a lady.
Spitzer, of course, has seen a revival of his stock as a financial and political pundit, despite having resigned over his prostitution habit. Over at Daily Finance, columnist Jeff Bercovici has been arguing that if CNN decides to give the ex-New York governor a “second coming,” (as various News Corp properties have termed it), they should line him up alongside a conservative “work wife”:
The ideal one would have to be Spitzer’s equal in smarts and toughness — part sparring partner, part work wife, part chaperone. You can see some of this dynamic at play on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where Mika Brzezinski’s eye-rolling keeps Joe Scarborough’s ego in check.
But where Brzezinski is content to let Scarborough do most of the talking, Spitzer requires a more assertive antagonist — someone who, by verbally flogging Spitzer on camera, would symbolically punish him for his sins toward women and thereby cleanse him of any residual skeeviness viewers might feel toward him.
When I met Spitzer at the Slate Christmas party a couple of years ago, one of his first post-scandal outings, he said his actual wife, Silda, read and edited his Slate columns, and after he left it was speculated that maybe she took out her justified anger on his sentence structure and quality of argument. (These days, Silda is giving seminars to teach women about money and investing.) However simplistic the conservative chick versus liberal dude paradigm is, it’s rather fun to imagine the cathartic sparring.
A poll on Daily Finance pitting several obvious female conservative picks (Sarah Palin? Yeah right) is pretty even split right now between the candidates, with Michelle Malkin slightly edging out the rest.
Who Should Be Eliot Spitzer’s CNN Work Wife? [Daily Finance]
Memo To CNN: Eliot Spitzer Needs A No-Nonsense Work Wife [Daily Finance]
Related: Silda Spitzer Now Teaching Women About Money And Investing [Babble]
Do You Have An Office Wife? [GQ]
Earlier: Campbell Brown And The Beauty Of Just Walking Away