Eastwood's 'empty chair' speech just gets more and more weird

Clint Eastwood’s bizarre “empty chair speech” at last year’s Republican National Convention just becomes more and more strange as the details come out.
The incident also demonstrates amply how the Republican fringe is so out of step with reality that they’ve lost touch with what it takes to win national elections.

According to the new book on the 2012 election, Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, one of Romney’s top advisors, Stuart Stevens, was so distraught with Eastwood’s unplanned shenanigans that he vomited backstage when the performance was over.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of this story is that Eastwood had no speech planned in advance of his surprise appearance at the convention. His motivation for the chair routine, in which he pretended to talk disparagingly to an invisible President Obama, was a Neil Diamond song.
The tune was "I Am, I Said," which includes these lyrics: “I am, I said, to no one there. And no one heard at all, not even the chair.”
Eastwood had already balked at delivering a standard convention speech and he heard the song playing in his hotel room before taking the stage.

These two campaign tidbits were previously reported by Dan Balz of The Washington Post and Becky Quick of CNBC, respectively, but the latest installment form Halperin and Heilemann has Washington abuzz.
Beyond the comic aspects, what’s interesting is that Eastwood’s anti-Obama ramblings played well inside the convention hall, and with hardcore Republicans watching on TV, and it was celebrated for days afterward on right-wing talk-radio. The Obama-haters were in heaven.

But the grown-ups in the GOP knew that the Romney campaign had just gone to hell. Viewers and commentators were baffled by Eastwood’s shtick. The former big-screen tough guy became the butt of jokes by late-night TV comics.

The GOP convention director running the show for the party was apparently scurrying around back stage, ready to pull his hair out, as he tried to figure out how the aging actor’s weird ad-libbing ever happened. The Romney family, including all of the sons, was seething after the Eastwood stunt.

But the tea party types, unable to recognize the convention moment for what it really was, were adamant: anyone who criticized “Dirty Harry’s” convention performance was a socialist or a communist or worse.