Eastwood did Romney a favor
by digby
Howard Kurtz is just wrong here:
By debating an empty chair that he pretended was President Obama–riffing through a series of strained jokes without a teleprompter–Eastwood ensured that at least half the chatter on Friday morning would be about him, not Romney. But by the weekend, that figure will rise to about 98 percent. And by Monday, Romney’s acceptance speech will be largely forgotten.
I hate to tell you Howard, it was going to be forgotten by Monday anyway. And if Eastwood had given a good speech everyone would have been talking about that today too, saying he should be the one who’s running for president. The problem, you see, isn’t Eastwood, it’s the corporation in a suit called Mitt Romney.
I’ll just take a moment here to disagree a little bit with David’s piece from this morning about Eastwood. I don’t know exactly why he’s doing as much as he is for Romney, but I don’t think it comes out of hardcore right wing convictions. I followed his political career closely when he was mayor of Carmel and doing a lot of public speaking and he’s a self-identified libertarian who is greatly at odds with the rank and file of the Republican Party on many issues close to their hearts. In fact, if he had been prepared and sober last night, he might have made that clear and all those Freepers would have been very uncomfortable. Instead, he was doddering and incoherent, so they just slapped their own views on to his dada-esque presentation and cheered. It was a big missed opportunity for the crazy Paulites (who got screwed at every turn.)
Anyway, while Eastwood’s bizarre performance is what everyone’s talking about today, it doesn’t follow that everyone would have been talking about Romney’s fabulous speech if it hadn’t happened. The speech was dull as dishwater and the greater likelihood is that we’d all have gone back to parsing Lyin’ Ryan’s speech from the night before. Eastwood did Romney a big favor.
Update: Funny —Andrea Mitchell and Brian Williams watching Eastwood:
.