Clint Eastwood conducted a comical question-and-answer session with an empty chair — which stood in for President Obama — at the Republican National Convention as he explained why he thinks “it’s time for somebody else to come and fix the problem.”
“We own this country . . . We’re the best and we should not ever forget that,” Eastwood said of the United States and Obama, before appealing to voters of all political persuasions. “When someone isn’t doing the job, we’ve got to let [him] go.”
Most of the speech featured Eastwood — without the assistance of a teleprompter or notes — riffing a conversation with the president in which he purported to ask Obama questions and respond to the president’s irritated replies.
“What do you want me to tell Romney?” Eastwood said, looking at the Obama chair. “I can’t tell him to do that. He can’t do that to himself. You’re absolutely crazy. You’re being as bad as Biden. Of course, we all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic Party. Kind of a grin with a body behind it.” He added later, as another supposed reply to Obama, “I can’t do that to myself either.”
At another point, “I’m not going to shut-up it’s my turn — yeah, we’re going to have to have a little chat about that.”
The speech seemed designed to give disillusioned Obama voters permission to vote for Mitt Romney. “This was great — everybody was crying; Oprah was crying; I was even crying,” Eastwood said of Obama’s first election. “I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there’s 23 million unemployed people in this country. That is something to cry for because that is a disgrace — a national disgrace — and we haven’t done enough obviously, and this administration hasn’t done enough, and whatever interest [in fixing the problem] they have is not strong enough.”
Eastwood ended by leading the convention crowd in a “Make my day” chant.
