Much ponderous, chin-stroking analysis has followed the Republican National Convention’s un-highlight — the 10-minute monologue by the erstwhile Dirty Harry/Blondie/Rowdy Yates when Clint Eastwood conversed with an empty chair.
What could it mean? Who allowed him to do that? What in the world were Republicans thinking?
And then The Thoughtful Ones commenced: What a waste of network time, a distraction from Mitt Romney’s moment. A faux narrative that keeps facts at bay and silliness front and center. It was disrespectful to the president. This is what it’s come to.
Oh, do drench thy couch with tears.
Confession: As I watched Eastwood from a seat in the convention center in Tampa, I thought: Hmmmm. What is this? Is it funny? Is it sad? Did he really say, “I can’t tell [Romney] to do that. He can’t do that to himself.”
Strange as it was, the overwhelming mood was, oh, well, it’s Clint Eastwood. Let him be Clint! But who knew Clint was a comedian?
Several days later, as the harrumphing subsides and the American zeitgeist has its way, it turns out that Eastwood was brilliant in a Garry Trudeau-ian way.
Just as “Doonesbury” creator Trudeau gave readers simple symbols by which to imagine and mock political figures — Dan Quayle’s feather; George W. Bush’s asterisk; George H.W. Bush’s point of light — Eastwood gave Republicans a near-perfect metaphor for their nemesis.
For GOPers, Barack Obama was always an empty suit, but a suit on a hanger would have been logistically problematic for Eastwood, who apparently asked for the chair last minute. Was he planning this all along and knew he’d have to fool his handlers in order to pull off his own private joke?
Eastwood isn’t saying. He’s had his fun and no doubt is enjoying the handwringing in his wake. Unscripted, unchecked and — at 82 not much concerned with aftermaths — Eastwood essentially goofed on everyone, amusing himself at the president’s expense.
Before pundits had a chance to organize their outrage, The Empty Chair had become an Internet sensation with a Twitter account. Less than a week later, it has had its own day. While Democrats were partying on Labor Day in Charlotte, Republicans were celebrating National Empty Chair Day by posting pictures of empty chairs. Among the primary instigators are bloggers.
It’s a fair wager that The Empty Chair will be around for a while.
Eastwood’s prank, though scorned by Democrats — those pillars of decorum — is now being embraced by the other side. Suggestions abound for comparable comebacks, including one involving Betty White and a toilet. Fill in your own one-liner, keeping in mind that elderly people can get away with saying anything. Apparently.
The empty chair even found its way to Charlotte on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, where it made an appearance during a speech by Lee Saunders, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. After ignoring the chair during most of his speech to Wisconsin’s delegates (he made similar remarks to Ohio’s delegates), Saunders said, “I don’t know if you noticed, but you see this chair? … He’s been listening to everything I had to say. So I want you to welcome Clint Eastwood.
“I’ve got a couple of questions … I want to ask Clint Eastwood. But first, buddy, what do you have to say for yourself? I didn’t hear you. … Clint’s been sitting here for the past hour. He doesn’t have anything to say for himself. Mitt Romney has nothing to say for himself. Paul Ryan has nothing to say for himself. We’ve got to make our voices heard. … If we do that, we will win in November. So I say to you, Dirty Harry: ‘Dirty Harry, make my day!’”
Whereupon Saunders knocked the empty chair off the stage. The ensuing thud was commentary. As they say, it isn’t so much the joke; it’s how you tell it.
All complaints about silliness and disrespect, meanwhile, will be drowned out by the deafening smirk of our nation’s unruly, irreverent crowd. More than any people on the planet, Americans love a good joke. We are iconoclasts at heart and any pretender to righteousness will be slain not by the bully but by the barb. The person who takes himself too seriously tosses an empty chair off the stage. The man who couldn’t care less chats with no one and rides off into the sunset.
In America’s most durable narrative, the cowboy always wins.
Kathleen Parker is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group. Her email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.
No mention of that the President even got into the post-chair act with a picture of him in his chair from behind with the caption, “This chair is occupied”. Priceless.
If Obama was sitting in it then it’s still empty.
It was perfect politics. Not only did it create the perfect metaphor for Obama, it scored with Florida retired voters and got the Democrats to attack a beloved elderly person for acting old. If the voters in Florida needed any other reason to question the sincerity of the Democrats, they got a big one.
It was the perfect metaphor for an empty, miserable, cynical Republican party.
While it does not surprise me that republicans loved it, Eastwood embarrassed himself and his country.
Thank you Clint for showing what a fraud we have
as pres.
The Alternative Universe and the Media Feedback Loop
By: Erick Erickson (Diary) | September 6th, 2012 at 03:30 AM | 2RESIZE:AAA
Yesterday in Charlotte the Democratic National Convention began as amateurishly as President Obama’s first term has been. Three times Mayor Villaraigosa of Los Angeles tried to get a majority of Democratic delegates to agree to add God and Jerusalem back into the Democratic Platform. Three times he failed. But on the third time, he declared he heard a two-thirds vote for changing the platform. Debbie Wasserman Schultz lied again saying there was no fight and called it a “technical change”, but the Democratic delegates booed putting God and his holy city back into the Democratic Platform.If booing God and his holy city is a part of the Democratic Convention happening in this universe, I’ll take the alternative universe Bill Clinton said the GOP lives in. This is why Barack Obama stands a good chance of losing. It is the Democrats who have disconnected from America.I’m on record repeatedly doubting Mitt Romney’s viability as a candidate, but more and more I think not only is Romney winning, but the polling is not reflecting the strength of his campaign and the media is actually sabotaging the Democrats’ chance of winning. In fact, I dare say if MItt Romney wins he will have the American media to thank for his win. Hear me out and I think you will agree.First, and I realize you will have to take my word for it, I have a pretty good gut check on winning and losing. My gut tells me Mitt Romney is doing better than I expected and better than the polling is suggesting. Anecdotes are not data, but more and more a steady stream of anecdotes are piling up to suggest Romney is winning.He is ahead by double digits in most polls with independents. More and more voters say Barack Obama does not deserve a second term. More and more voters think Barack Obama’s handling of the economy has been bad. More and more voters trust Mitt Romney to handle the economy, jobs, and even entitlements than Barack Obama.In the past two years the Democrats and certain members of the media have invested a lot of time and energy telling independent voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 that they’d be racists to abandon him. “Racism” is cropping up more and more as a rebuttal to all attacks against Barack Obama. At the same time, the left has used “bigotry” to attack any person who supports marriage.Poling on marriage has become terribly inaccurate. Ask a person if they favor changing marriage and most will say yes, but in more than 30 states the voters keep rejecting it. Voters do not want to let pollsters think they are bigots anymore than they want pollsters to think them racists. So they ago along to get along.If, however, a pollster asks voters how they think their neighbors will vote on gay marriage, suddenly polls become a lot more accurate. Voters are happy to tell pollsters that they are sophisticated, but that their neighbors are bigots. In North Carolina, asking voters about their neighbors’ vote on gay marriage rendered a much more accurate poll more closely resembling the final outcome than asking about the voter’s own vote.I’m beginning to think pollsters need to start asking voters who they think their neighbor will vote for President. Yesterday, we got a startling hint at this.Eighty-nine percent of Republicans said the president after Obama would be from their camp, and 55 percent of independents agreed. Surprisingly 38 percent of Democrats had the same view (versus 47 percent who said it would be a Democrat). The telephone survey was taken during the last two nights of the GOP convention and got answers from 1,000 voters, meaning it was a typical sample.With that many independents and Republicans and more than a third of Democrats thinking MItt Romney will win, I think standard polling on the horserace may have the same problems the gay marriage polling has had — the Democrats have done a damn fine job of throwing out racism and bigotry so much that voters are less than honest with pollsters.So if Mitt Romney is such a bad candidate, why do I think he’s winning and what does the media have to do with it? It’s actually a pretty easy concept to grasp.The Democrats and most of the mainstream media live in a symbiotic relationship and feedback loop. When Todd Akin says something dumb, the media seizes on it and attacks Todd Akin and the GOP. For the past several weeks the media has fixated on how out of touch the GOP is, its platform is, and its Presidential candidate is.At the same time, the media has been largely silent on the Democratic Platform except for yesterday’s ridiculousness. Even then, the media mostly failed to point out that the Obama campaign said it had approved the platform removing God and Jerusalem, while going to great lengths to point out Obama intervened to put them back in.Meanwhile, the Democrats booed God and his holy city the day after claiming we all belong the government as if it is some sort of Rotary Club.This becomes the fatal problem for the Democrats — the media reinforces that the Democrats are grounded in reality and connected to America when they are not.The Democrats actually have a very extremist position on abortion. The media that spent so long focused on the GOP’s position has barely dealt with the Democrats. Why? Because most of the mainstream media is in ideological lockstep with the Democrats on this. It’s hard to tell the Democrats they’ve gone too far astray from mainstream America when the mainstream media is over on the lefthand side to begin with.The Democrats, in other words, overplayed their hand on the War on Women and there is no media voice they listen to saying, “Hold up, you’ve gone too far.” Most of the media is with or to the left of the Democrats on this. For a year now you and I have been hearing about the growing secularization of and atheism in America. I now see that’s no longer a coincidence, but another effort to feed the Democrats’ feedback loop in much the same way polls were being churned out in the press in 2010 showing how popular Obamacare would be despite all objective polling showing it was not.Consequently, the Democrats turned Sandra Fluke and Elizabeth Warren into cult heroes on feminism and liberal issues. Barack Obama utters, “you didn’t build that” and the Democrats start their convention telling us we all belong to the government. They get rid of God and Jerusalem, give a podium to two disastrous speeches by Fluke and Warren that I’m willing to bet did more harm than good, hand much of the rest of the convention over to abortion rights activists, see MSNBC hosts wear buttons with uteruses on them, and think that they are connecting with middle America because the media is not raising red flags in the way the media does with the GOP.The feedback loop between the Democrats and the media has pushed the Democrats well outside the mainstream and I believe there is a silent majority looking at this festival of the bizarre in Charlotte in absolute revulsion. They hear “fair share” and cringe. They hear Bill Clinton ask if people are better off than they were four years ago and are shocked the Democrats yell back “yes.”The Democrats, having so many ideological soul mates from New York City and DC in the media, lack a buffer to their echo chamber and the feedback loop has only accelerated.I really don’t think Mitt Romney is a strong candidate. And I’ve consistently believed he would lose. But now I think he’s winning and doing so largely because the Democrats have so overplayed their hand on social issues while ignoring the economy with no corrective from the media. The American people are aghast at what they are seeing and will respond accordingly at the polls.The Democrats have made the one always fatal mistake anyone can make in politics — they’ve believed their own press.
A truly excellent piece.
The Main Stream Media, that put Obama on an “untouchable pedestal” four years ago, are now in the process of sawing away the underpinning of same……….and they don’t even know it!
It is truly fitting that the seeds of his presidency are being destroyed by those who planted them in the first place.
Obama was the first true “media president” and has been an unmitigated disaster!
really? the media has controlled the elections since the first televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon. They have sustained the 2 party paradigm.
The most intersting thing about Eastwoods speech is to watch all of the folks who truly believe that he was just a “doddering old fool” as in “On Golden Pond”, and do not realize what really happened there.
Eastwood, on stage, (and he was on stage the other night!) is a master of delivering lines in very few words, that don’t necessarily go straight to the point, but instead take an oblique, cutting way to get the point across. I have loved the man, and respected his ability, since he was Rowdy Yates in Rawhide, when I was a kid. This was classic Eastwood at work. If you are at all familiar with the “Dirty Harry” series of 5 movies that Eastwood directed and starred in, then you have seen him at work before, in this same way. There are numerous lines in all of those 5 movies, delivered in exactly the same fashion!
He executed a “gotcha moment” that was so good, and so effective, that the other side of the political aisle totally failed to understand what really took place.
The works of a true master of his craft, that was!
Thanks Clint, for all the years of entertainment, including last week especially!
He seem to be the only one who received it that way. His speech was not a hit and it was not helpful.
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Was Barack Obama A Foreign Exchange Student? Posted 08/09/2012 06:34 PM ETEmail Print License CommentinShareTransparency: A former classmate has added a tantalizing question to the mysteries surrounding Barack Obama’s college years. Perhaps the GOP nominee, whose tax records are demanded, should call the president’s bluff.Not many students whose grades supposedly were good enough to get into Harvard Law School can say that 400 of their classmates taken randomly don’t remember a single thing about him or his even being there. But Barack Obama, Columbia University class of ’83, can.Student Obama spent two years at Columbia after transferring there from Occidental College in Los Angeles. And for all the impression he made on his classmates, he might as well have been in the witness protection program.The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that Fox News called that random group of 400 Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama.Like most transfer students, Obama lived off-campus, a factoid defenders use to explain his apparent lack of human contact during his Columbia years. Obama himself does not speak much about his years at Columbia and Harvard Law, other than he attended both and was elected president of the Harvard Law Review.Interestingly, Obama contributed not one signed word to the Harvard Law Review or any other legal publication. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, “A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at anytime.” A curious factoid for an alleged scholar.In October 2007, the New York Times ran a piece titled “Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say,” which would have won the Pulitzer Prize for understatements if there was one.The article noted that Obama, when asked, “declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.”Subscribe to the IBD Editorials PodcastOne of those fellow students is Wayne Allen Root, former Libertarian vice presidential nominee. He wonders, as we do, what’s in Obama’s Columbia file that warrants standards of secrecy higher than, say, the details of the Osama bin Laden raid or our efforts to derail Iran’s nuclear program with a computer virus.Root asks if Obama’s grades were good enough to get into Columbia. We have a copy of Mitt Romney’s high school report card, which was deemed by the Boston Globe important enough to reveal to the world, but President Obama’s Columbia transcripts remain a mystery.