To be clear the words in the headline are mine. However they are my summary of a blog post that Roger Ebert has put up.
His post pretty much sums up my views as well. I feel kind of sad that a lot of ridicule is being directed at Eastwood himself. To be fair he is an 82 year old man. I do not think it does anyone any good to mock an 82 year old man. Yes the chair thing is funny, and I see no harm, but the attacks on Eastwood himself seem a bit too much. What really should be examined is 'is this how a Romney administration would govern'? Vet Ron Paul's speech but not Clint Eastwood? It raises a number of questions.
But anyways, on to Ebert's post. He starts off with a humorous bit about how this is playing worldwide:
Two days later, not a word of Romney's acceptance speech has entered the public discourse. But Eastwood's dialog with a chair has entered forever into political legend, and it's amusing to read reports that his viewers from around the world were mystified. Iranian Facebook pages "treated it with suspicious befuddlement," an Atlantic blog reports, and in China the speech is being used to teach English on a web site. The headline says, "Gelivable English Langauge Teaching: Exchange Cooperation Model Innovation," says the Atlantic's Max Fisher, who adds: "I don't know what that means, either."
He then examines how this happened:
I believe that what we saw was a combination of two speeches: (1) Clint delivering what was intended as ironic wit, and (2) his half-hearted attempt to recycle some of the "talking points" we now know the GOP staff pumped him with backstage. Speech One was a miscalculation and Speech Two contained some of the right words floating in a muddled void.
The audience only made things worse:
It's possible that the audience did Clint no favors. He was greeted with the ecstasy you might expect if Michael Phelps turned up at a high school swim team banquet. They took his appearance as a compliment to themselves; here was a legend, granting recognition to them. The audience cheered, laughed, stood up, sat down, stood again, waved signs, and in their reaction shots showed little sign that they were listening intently. After days of political speechmaking of numbing sameness, here was a movie star! Doing a shtick with a chair! Blessed relief!
And the RNC handlers:
Ask yourself: What did he want to say about Afghanistan? What did he say? What did he think he said? You could see him correcting his course in mid-stream. If he was confused about the Obama and Romney policies in Afghanistan, well, so is everybody. Did he think Romney would agree with him that Obama should have instantly pulled out our troops?
I have a hunch. The conventional strategists would have been wiser to send Clint out to wing it. Giving him a single Talking Point was an error. Here is a man who knows who he is and what he does, and has never been comfortable with anybody's party line. In his mind was the flow of what he wanted to say and do, and then an undertow of Talking Points that threw him off his own message.
I thought the 'stellar businessman' 'quote unquote' line was odd when it happened and now I see why.