MB Civic

Michael Barbaro and Michael Shear reporting for the NYT ..

[T]he most bizarre, head-scratching 12 minutes in recent political convention history .. Mr. Eastwood’s convention cameo was cleared by Mr. Romney’s top message mavens, Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens.. They gave him a time limit and flashed a blinking red light that told him his time was up. He ignored both. The actor’s decision to use a chair as a prop was last-minute, and his own. “The prop person probably thought he was going to sit in it,” a baffled senior aide said on Thursday night. Mr. Eastwood’s rambling and off-color appearance just moments before the biggest speech of Mr. Romney’s life instantly became a Twitter and cable-news sensation, which drowned out much of the usual postconvention analysis that his campaign had hoped to bask in. It also startled and unsettled Mr. Romney’s top advisers and prompted a blame game among them. “Not me,” an exasperated-looking senior adviser said .. In interviews, aides called the speech “strange” and “weird.” One described it as “theater of the absurd.” .. Initially, there were no plans for Mr. Eastwood to take a chair onstage. But at the last minute, the actor asked the production staff backstage if he could use one but did not explain why

.. read more