Did Clint Eastwood's bizarre convention speech actually help Mitt Romney?

Much of the world cringed as Eastwood berated an invisible Obama at the GOP convention. The Right is celebrating Eastwood's talk-to-the-chair speech as a misunderstood triumph

Clint Eastwood bows after talking to an empty chair at the GOP convention in Florida on Aug. 30: Some pundits suggest the the hubbub surrounding the actor's speech is, counterintuitively, a n
(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Clint Eastwood's bizarre, unscripted speech at the Republican National Convention is something of a political Rorschach test. Republican delegates at the convention and conservative activists across the country loved the salty 12-minute "dialogue" with an invisible Obama seated in an empty chair; nonpartisan political reporters and most TV pundits declared it a momentum-sapping, off-message disaster; liberals loved the primetime spectacle of an aging actor hijacking Mitt Romney's big night; Team Romney was reportedly miffed; and President Obama declared himself a "huge Clint Eastwood fan" and shrugged off the actor's attacks. (For late-night comedians' takes, see video below.) Now, several days after Eastwood's speech, the political world is still engaged in "a heated debate about whether it was historically bad or sneaky good," says Chris Cillizza at The Washington Post. Cillizza is firmly on the "historically bad" side, but the Right is energetically reclaiming Eastwood's cri de coeur as a successful rallying cry. Conservatives have appropriated the initially mocking Twitter meme "#Eastwooding" (photos of people berating empty chairs) and rechristened Labor Day as "Empty Chair Day." "Clint Eastwood resonated with voters outside the snotty, derisive NY-DC-Hollywood axis," conservative blogger Michelle Malkin tells Politico. "Activists on the Right wanted to demonstrate... their appreciation." Can Republicans turn Eastwood's widely panned performance into a political plus for Mitt Romney?

The pundits called this one wrong: Sure, "Eastwood's speech had notable shortcomings," says Joseph Charlton in Britain's The Independent. But the "predominantly derisive response" from the media missed the speech's "rousing effect on many putatively Republican-voting Americans." Eastwood was "stirringly patriotic" and "seductively old-fashioned," speaking with a colorful grandeur missing from the "bland and carefully scripted" Romney campaign. Besides, Eastwood's speech has gone viral on YouTube, and "any publicity is good publicity" for Romney.

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