Clint Eastwood’s Senior Moment

The footage of Eastwood rambling and mumbling to his “Harvey”—President Obama—will be played to audiences a hundred years from now as the Most Bizarre Convention Moment Ever. The people of the future will know nothing about Dirty Harry or Josey Wales or Million Dollar Baby. They will know about the night a crazy old man hijacked a national party’s most important gathering so he could literally tell the president to go do something to himself (i.e. fuck himself).

I don’t think this moment is going to be nearly as important as Moore posits. It was bizarre, sure, but the notion that a blustering 10-minute speech by an otherwise well regarded icon will be his lasting legacy is wishful thinking. Ezra Klein:

Of all the failures of planning, this was surely the most severe. They took one of the three hours the networks were showing live and handed a large chunk of it to an elderly actor without even asking to read his speech beforehand. It was as if whoever was vetting convention speeches also didn’t know who Thursday’s “mystery speaker” was. This was time that could have been used for the excellently produced biographical video that came on shortly before Eastwood, or for a personal testimonial from one of Romney’s admiring friends or business partners.

Perhaps, but for all the rant’s idiosyncrasies — the aside about how attorneys should not be president considering Mitt Romney graduated from Harvard Law —  the crowd was absolutely loving it. I suspect that most Republicans at the convention and at home found the performance (and make no mistake, this was inherently a performance, not a political speech meant to fit into a sweeping Romney narrative) largely entertaining. Clint Eastwood equals America for a lot of people. Derek Hunter rolls his eyes:

What all the spin, all the MSNBC hosts and paid consultants or pictures of Obama sitting in chairs in the world can’t change is that that chair is still empty when it comes to successes and to ideas for improving upon his failed record. And what all of those things will never, ever be able to change is the fact that a man, an icon that the American people know, love and trust, went around the President’s media guard dogs directly to them and pointed it out for the whole world to see.

It’s true that derision of the speech may be somewhat of an inside the beltway meme, but it’s not exactly like Clintwood really stuck it to the president or the “liberal media” either. He looked like a bumbling old man. It was kind of charming, yes, but at the end of the day it did feel rather inappropriate for a national convention. You can be sure Mitt Romney was hoping people would be talking more about his convention speech than Eastwood’s too. Still, if a liberal comedian were to do a similar shtick against Romney at the DNC, everyone would be eating it up.