Eastwood’s Convention Stunt Made Romney Advisor Literally Puke
The hits just keep on coming from Mark Heileman and John Heileman’s new book “Game Change”. Make sure you have your airsickness bags handy:
A top advisor to former governor and erstwhile presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R-MA) was reportedly so horrified at 2012 Republican National Convention keynote speaker Clint Eastwood’s bizarre “empty chair” speech that he threw up backstage when it was over. The speech was a last-minute gamble, and the aging actor’s rambling address to an invisible President Barack Obama went poorly, leaving many viewers and commentators baffled.
According to the Washington Post‘s review of the new book Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Stuart Stevens, one of Romney’s top media advisors, immediately felt that Eastwood’s performance was a disaster for the Romney campaign. …
Pres. Obama is portrayed in the book as brilliant but prickly with a disdain for the nuts and bolts of politicking. He was reportedly impatient with former Pres. Bill Clinton at times and had little interest in making polite conversation with mega-donors.
The Romney campaign reportedly comes off the worse in the book, however, a headless monster with no solid command structure that careened from crisis to crisis during the election. The Post review portrayed the campaign as having an addiction to stunts and a “bad habit of reacting to news cycles with snap decisions, always felt more ad hoc, with tactics trumping strategy.”
