Aide: Romney found Eastwood speech "funny"
Actor Clint Eastwood speaks to an empty chair while addressing delegates during the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., on Thursday, Aug. 30, 2012.
/ AP Photo/Lynne SladkyUpdated with additional comments Saturday, 8:21 a.m. ET
(CBS News) KENNER, La. -- A senior adviser to Mitt Romney's campaign acknowledged on Friday that actor/director Clint Eastwood veered off previously discussed talking points in his controversial Republican National Convention address, but said the Republican nominee enjoyed the speech and found it "funny."
"I was backstage with him and he was laughing," said the adviser, Stuart Stevens, speaking to reporters aboard Romney's charter flight in the New Orleans metropolitan area.
The New York Times, quoting unnamed aides, said Eastwood's speech seemed to startle and unsettle the Romney campaign, and that several of them took pains to distance themselves from the decision to put him onstage without a script that had been rehearsed like virtually all other prime-time convention addresses.
Eastwood's speech, which went for 12 minutes instead of the allotted five, consisted largely of a meandering indictment of President Obama, with the Hollywood icon addressing an empty chair to represent Mr. Obama. He touched on a variety of topics, from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay to the war in Afghanistan, while also getting in digs at Biden -- whom he called "a grin with a body behind it" -- and seemingly made a coarse joke about the president.
Asked for his reaction to the joke, Stevens said it was "probably a lot less damaging and meaningless and more meaningless than the president of the United States supporting a campaign that's accusing Mitt Romney of being responsible of someone's murder," referring to an ad created by a super PAC supporting Obama that sought to link Romney's Bain Capital to a woman's death from cancer. Stevens later said he had been referring to the cancer death and had not meant to use the word "murder."
Stevens said Eastwood did not have prepared remarks and was planning to ad-lib.
Stevens called Eastwood's use of the chair "improv" and said the campaign was unaware that Eastwood was going to use the prop. The actor asked for the chair shortly before going onstage, but a Romney aide said the prop person assumed Eastwood was going to sit in it.
"I never discussed, I mean, about a chair. Don't know," said Stevens. "This was an idea, a moment that moved him, I would say, and he went with it."
Although Stevens acknowledged that he began eyeing the clock as Eastwood's remarks stretched on, he insisted that the campaign was happy with the celebrity's performance.
"He's an astonishing talent ... he's had the most remarkable career," Stevens said. "And if someone wants to say, 'Well, you know, I would have done this differently or that differently,' have at it."
Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, told a television station in Virginia on Friday that he wasn't bothered by the speech. "I think Clint Eastwood was just being Clint Eastwood," Ryan said.
Rebecca Kaplan contributed
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Clint Eastwood was very funny.
The key thing is to have people laughing WITH you, not at you.
You and your other fellow Republicans didn't really have a choice but to think it was funny, did you? You can't let the rest of America know how embarrassed you were. Romney screwed up having him on there, so he pretty well had to make out that everything was hunkey dorey.
I feel sorry for Clint Eastwood. Very stupid move on his part. In the future when I think of Clint Eastwood, this is what I'll be remembering, not his acting.
http://theamericansnc.com/2012/08/31/go-ahead-make-my-day-twenty-direct-quotes-from-clint-eastwoods-rnc-speech-indicating-convention-revelers-did-just-that/
i am not picking minor things on which to aim my focus but i am seriously monitoring they way in which the gop will not allow any true focus on their candidate. might i suggest that the conservative media has conned you into believing that they offer something better by having you waste your time demonizing liberals rather than investigating conservatives?
every time i read some "liberal media" rant, i can be certain that it comes from someone in need of not too complex fighting points. all media and all journalists have a point of view. but i have a personal point of view. it involves my relationship with the information the candidate provides me. i've been in conferences with sean spicer and i get daily updates from the rnc website as well as from both candidates' campaigns. i watch fox, msnbc, cnn, bbc and al jazeera. i have a friend in romney's press pool and even friends who work at bain. i am not pre-disposed to hating mitt romney nor am i blinded by the circus that is his campaign. what concerns me about him are the same points well documented by fox and clearly stated by the conservatives against whom mitt romney ran.
assuming you spend more time actually getting to know romney than you spend ranting against the so called liberal media, you are surely familiar with the negative issues romney presents for the party. romney hides and/or disavows his record. he has not been vetted and nobody has shown us any clear policy agenda. if i were foolishly in line with the war on women, you cannot even assure me that romney would not, once in office, reconsider the ghostly voice of his loving mother imploring him to embrace a woman's choice! mitt romney refuses to let ANYONE know his true self. ESPECIALLY HIS SUPPORTERS!!!
in order that you be distracted from that internal conundrum, the gop has you conned into fighting liberal media empires to the point that you ignore rupert murdoch's vast conglomerate or the fact that conservative radio exponentially dwarfs any liberal counterpart. i cannot visit a "liberal media" website without encountering troll-ish behavior like yours. but i have noted that the fox website entertains no comments, dissenting voices or reasonable discourse. your time might be better spent questioning the first amendment-stifling, would-be conservative bullhorn over at fox.
without knowing me, you are quick to assume points about my whole political and moral make-up then you go on to accuse me of not fairly considering mitt romney's whole political and moral make-up!(now, if that ain't the mauviel calling the calphalon, "aluminum"! ann or her "tuna helper" should get that one...)
well, realtimecoffee person, the outrage FROM which you write often comes in short un-thought out little bursts. but nothing pulls me back to our truly gifted president like the secretive heads and exploding anuses of the republican party. you can blame that, fellow american, on conservative trolls...
And for those who like a good drama, I don't watch much TV, but my roommate turned me on to a show that is currently waiting for next season to begin, it's called NEWSROOM with Jeff Daniels and I think it's pretty good. From EP1 I watched almost the whole season in one sitting.