So what the heck really happened with Clint Eastwood at the end of last week's wacky Republican convention?
After watching the spectacle of the veteran Hollywood superstar argue with his non-spectral apparition in that now infamous empty chair on international television, President Barack Obama left the White House early Friday morning to fly to El Paso, Texas. I'm told he was in a good mood. Who could blame him?
Eastwood is a very familiar character here in California. I've met him, can't say I know him, but certainly know friends of his. This episode surprised me on a few levels. In contrast to what many would suppose after his not A-OK speech to the once GOP, he has numerous ties Democratic as well as Republican.
Not so lucky ... "in all this excitement."
Which makes Thursday's appearance, backing the most conservative Republican presidential nominee in a long time, rather curious.
Eastwood was apparently drawn to Romney when he was in Massachusetts directing his classic film Mystic River and Romney was running for his lone term as governor of the Bay State. Which, er, doesn't necessarily explain much, especially after Eastwood did this year's famous Super Bowl ad for Chrysler -- "It's Halftime in America" -- in which Eastwood extols the saving of the American auto industry. Romney, of course, opposed the very plan which saved the auto industry, championed by that invisible guy in the chair.
No less than Karl Rove was outraged by Eastwood's ad, telling Fox News: "I was, frankly, offended by it. It is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising."
(Incidentally, Rove was quite wrong in saying that the Eastwood Super Bowl ad was paid for with taxpayer dollars. The successfully bailed out Chrysler, saved by the very Obama plan Romney opposed, had already paid the government back.)
In any event, for whatever reason he did it, Eastwood showed up at a Romney fundraiser last month in Idaho to deliver an endorsement, thrilling the candidate and his team.
Since Eastwood is an icon who exudes the sort of grounded American masculinity that the elitist Romney so notably lacks, it's easy to see why he would be placed in the prime time program as one of the two presenters of the nominee. What's not so easy to see is how the debacle of Eastwood's presentation happened.
The official word from the Romney camp is that Eastwood, who argued with an empty chair -- making him only the latest among folks of all ideological persuasions to argue with an imaginary Obama, who has governed essentially as advertised in his 2008 campaign policy book, which I keep on my desk -- was ad libbing.
Team Romney, in this version, turned over the stage to Eastwood and hoped for the best.
In his Super Bowl ad earlier this year, Clint Eastwood praised the successful rescue of the U.S. auto industry that Mitt Romney opposed.
Well, if so, and that would be one of the biggest ifs you can find, that would be quite extraordinary, to say the least.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger, then merely the sitting governor of California and not a former mayor of Carmel, spoke to the 2004 Republican National Convention, his speech was gone over and over with a fine tooth comb.
In my own observation and experience, no star, no matter how cool or commanding, is given anything near this high profile a platform and simply trusted to make the magic.
Yet in the official scenario, Eastwood went on twice as long as scheduled and went on stage with a chair, supposedly surprising only the prop master who figured he might sit in it. And what of the senior Romney campaign figures you would expect to crowd around Clint off-stage? Crickets.
MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell says that Romney senior strategist Stuart Stevens was behind it, and that things simply went bad.
Stevens, as O'Donnell pointed out, likes Hollywood and has worked in Hollywood. In fact, he worked for O'Donnell on the NBC series Mister Sterling. I worked on the show, too, which is how I got to know Stevens. O'Donnell was a West Wing producer before and after Mister Sterling, a show about a maverick son of a beloved former Democratic governor of California who is appointed to the U.S. Senate and turns out to be an independent (any similarities to Jerry Brown and Pat Brown are entirely coincidental).
Stevens was later media consultant for Republican Steve Poizner in his 2010 Republican primary race, ironically opposing Romney protege Meg Whitman. Poizner, once a moderate ally of Schwarzenegger, ran hard at Whitman from the right, closing a huge gap only to be driven back by a relentlessly negative campaign pointing out the Poizner wasn't the right-winger he made himself out to be and that Whitman was the real conservative. (Which of course helped Jerry Brown in the general election.) I haven't talked to Stevens about the Eastwood matter.
This wouldn't be the first time that a Republican campaign, highly irritated by Obama's hold on much of the electorate, would go for a play that, internally, seems clever and emotionally satisfying but externally, well, not so much. I have talked about that very thing with McCain for President campaign director Steve Schmidt, the former Schwarzenegger campaign manager, writing about it here several times, most recently in the spring in my piece around the Game Change movie.
I felt badly for Eastwood, whom I've admired since I was a kid.
He was a John McCain backer in 2008, which makes more sense to me than Romney. The Vietnam War hero McCain (Romney toughed out the days of the Vietnam War, which he backed vociferously, as a Mormon missionary in, er, France) at least had the background of someone who was willing to go against the partisan grain.
Which Eastwood himself has done in California.
He's friendly with Governor Jerry Brown, endorsed Senator Dianne Feinstein, and was appointed by then Governor Gray Davis to the state Parks & Recreation Commission. He's also a friend of other Democrats, like former San Francisco Mayor and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and former Assemblyman and Coastal Commission chairman Rusty Areias.
It was fellow Republican Schwarzenegger, who expanded on Eastwood's penchant for action movie catch phrases in his own superstar career, who decided not to reappoint Eastwood to the state parks commission in 2008, a move Eastwood ascribed to his opposition to a toll road through a Southern California state park.
Clint Eastwood argued with an imaginary President Barack Obama during his appearance on the last night of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.
None of which marks Eastwood as the likeliest character to show up to make the big pitch for the likes of Romney. Maybe some things just don't make sense. Which sounds like something a character in Eastwood's classic revisionist Western Unforgiven might say, come to think of it. But one thing's clear: A man's got to know his limitations.
And what to say about closing night at the Republican National Convention?
Well, we saw pretty much the same Mitt Romney as always. Notably, he had no specifics on his plan to revive the U.S. economy. He promised to create 12 million jobs, a specific number, but didn't say how that would happen.
So if you don't have faith that doubling down on the last administration's old time religion of tax cuts and regulatory cuts and ramping up the oil industry gets you 12 million new jobs -- and does not further bust the budget -- you are left unsatisfied with it all.
So, despite the distraction, you can't blame Eastwood for the result of the convention, which as the Gallup Poll shows ended with Romney as the first nominee of either party in 40 years to get no bounce, his speech the lowest rated since Bob Dole's.
As I wrote here before Romney spoke, the outcome was always likely to be a replay of the old ad tag line that Don Draper could have written: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression."
You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.
William Bradley Huffington Post Archive
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/bill-hillary-clinton_b_1862945.html
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Ah, nice zinger, Kal!
Enough of the hero worship. I like Clint's movies and the characters he plays. But as Elvis once said when asked about what he thought of his own image, "the image is one thing, and the human being is another".
Clint's just an actor and his characters are fictional creations. Clint the man, few of us know that man. We only know him via his fictional characters.
Weirdly, for all the right-wing's railing against actors and such as "Hollywood Elites" they are the party that recruits actors to be their political leaders. The Dems have had a few over the years, as we do currently with Al Franken. But Al and other celebrity Dems decided personally to serve in politics, they weren't recruited as gop "Hollywood Elites" have been.
The vast majority of entertainers in politics are the recruited gop "Hollywood Elites".
And why do they recruit from their much-PRed-hated "Hollywood Elites"?
Cont...
Then I just ran across your commentary and my comments, if all of them will be allowed, and are on point and come back to Mr. Eastwood and your points, but due to word limitation, must be posted in pieces, and figured, hey, this will work excellently here!
Reagan was not "The Gipper". He was just an actor who PLAYED..."The Gipper".
But the gop insiders knew they could parlay that image and George Gipp's nickname and cinemtaic "heroism" into a PR propagandized fictional image of the actor Ronald Reagan into a political ship to sail on and so did, finally, after some many years, and with the neo-cons of the Bushco1 crew, the Bushes themselves never cared for the Reagans. In fact, it's been widely reported they loathed the Reagans) installing him in office as the "Face" of their party while going about the business behind the scenes of rigging our political system to tip the economic system to their favor.
Cont...
And what about that movie, a baseball story timed for release around playoff/World Series time? Assuming it's a good, well-reviewed film, will Democrats pay to see it? Can they separate the artist from the political shill? Do the movie's producers think the convention speech was a help, a non-factor, or a drag on the potential box office?
What ever happened to Lee?
Romney 1040
Obama 2012
I would ask, were I to go down that side road, about Ennio Morricone.
He is a brilliant artist. He has made more money than most americans make in 100 life times.
Where did America go wrong by Clint? How does he go from a world class man-of-the-world to another whining rich white guy?
It has/had everything to do with preventing the country from changing into one where an individual cannot be self sufficient and very successful.
Interesting points, but what did you mean by this one?
>4 - the chair should have been put in of the podium this way we wouldn't have to constantly lean into the mic and look at the chair at the same time,
What it looked like was an old Hollywood tough guy brought in to speak to a bunch of not so tough old white guys to give them a thrill. It's kind of pathetic.
It's more atmospheric, trying to boost Romney on the testosterone, regular guy level.
I was truly embarrassed for him.
Had he come out and reprised his Chrysler ad, albeit apro-romney variant, as I figured he would, he would have retained his dignity and even if one would have disagreed with some or more of what he could have said in a real speech once could have said, hey, Clint may be off the mark here in my opinion, but he has the right to his choice and opinions and he gave a good speech befitting his years and stature.
Instead he shambled out, disheveled, shaky and unsure looking, to proceed to do a SKIT of the poor quality one would normally find every Saturday on SNL that pandered to the worst of the worst of the very far-right. He came off as immature, petty, not in commeand of the real facts (such as the fact that the presidne indeed has honored all his promises but because of the GOP's Party Of No! intransigent obstructionism all though his 3 1/3 years to spin that against him, the proposals president Obama put forward and the legislation brought forth by the Dems either got watered down to ineffectuality or killed outright by the Make-Obama-A-1-Termer-At-Any-Cost-To-The-Nation GOP) and merely as another out of touch "Hollywood Elite" partisan shill.
It was truly sad to watch.
Watch the reality show his wife and kids are doing, my daughter wouldn't have the nerve to ask for a $6,000 purse.
By making another retailer of Chinese plastic crap like Staples of course. Only bigger this time and offering 10 cents above minimum wage.