"Power-less locals get by best they can," read the headline in Friday's New Orleans _Times-Picayune. _ Give the harried editors credit: They knew they were only a hyphen away from imitating _The Onion. _But since I'm one of those powerless—sorry, "power-less"—locals, and have been since Isaac shut us down Tuesday night, you can imagine how excited I am that Mitt Romney headed here straight from the GOP convention to demonstrate his concern.

As Mitt's handlers may have figured out too late, it wasn't as if Isaac was the second coming of Katrina. After only two years in NOLA, my wife and I were hurricane virgins. But even we could tell by Wednesday afternoon that this was one dinky substitute for apocalypse-now. (Well, at least so far as New Orleans went; many people elsewhere had worse luck.)

No juice and no Internet have been the big hangups, though we are starting to wonder about doing our laundry. We're heard from our neighbors about a couple of Trivial Pursuit games that turned kind of ugly. The odds of the situation deteriorating into mass cannibalism or something seem awfully remote, though.

Of course, this also means it wasn't until I got online Friday morning at a local dive bar with Wi-Fi that I learned I hadn't just missed Romney's coronation Thursday night. I'd missed Clint Eastwood, too.

For a media critic, this was the equivalent of the religious correspondent for the _Roman Empire Times _being MIA at Gethsemane. Cryptic Facebook status updates involving old Neil Diamond lyrics, Photoshopped Grampa Simpson pics and mock slogans like "Chairs Are People, Too" were my first hint that perhaps Clint's big moment hadn't gone off quite as planned.

Once I got up to speed, I was fascinated to find that "planned" was such a misnomer. There is no more remarkable testimony to Clint's iconicity than the fact that the Republican Party is notorious for micromanaging conventions until anything resembling spontaneous human interest is just a distant memory--and yet they honest-to-gosh let him stroll onstage on the crucial night of Romney's acceptance speech without vetting his script or even seeming to care whether he had one.

There may be no other living American—either one of the President Bushes included—to whom the GOP would have given comparable latitude. And now that we all know what Eastwood did with it, the obvious question is "What in hell was he thinking?"

Believe it or not, I'm reasonably sure I've figured out the answer, or answers. To make sense of the intended effect, we only need to postulate three things.


First, that Eastwood—not unlike Ronald Reagan—draws from old movies and folklore in calculating his own moves. Second, as is well known, he's an old-school believer in limited government who in fact has no use for big chunks of the current Republican agenda. He's pro-choice, doesn't give a fuck who marries who, and is generally contemptous of the GOP's avidity for social hysteria. And third, he's well aware that he's, ahem, Clint Eastwood—an American legend whose stature transcends workaday politics and even pop culture itself. Clint may wear his crown lightly, but he's never tossed it aside.

With all that in mind, let's reconstruct how his 82-year-old synapses were prompting him. As it happens, the debating-an-empty-chair gambit is an old stunt in American politics. It's inherently dramatic in a Hollywood, underdog, Frank Capra sort of way. All the same, it works best when a) you're an actual candidate yourself and b) your opponent has refused to debate you, neither one of which applied here. That was Mistake #1 in Clint's case.

Mistake #2 is more complicated. Conceptually, the brilliance of pretending to address Obama directly was that it let Eastwood avoid expressing solidarity with today's GOP. Most convention speakers want to forge a bond with the troops by creating a "We" out of an "I." But Clint Eastwood isn't a "We" kind of dude. If he had tried to create an identification between himself and the conventioneers, they'd naturally have been thrilled to identify with _him. _But he might have been less thrilled to identify with them, especially since he despises so many of their real-world priorities.

So he tried to outflank the issue by turning them into a mere, presumably appreciative, audience for Clint going one-on-one vs. Obama. What doomed his strategy was that no "I" in the world—not even Clint's—can survive a convention's rabid need for a "We." Eastwood, for once, looked like an amateur.

That brings us to Mistake #3.

The unstated premise of debating an absent Obama was that our 44th president and Clint were figurative equals, which isn't totally nonsensical. As American icons go, Eastwood actually has a pretty good poker hand vs. Obama. In almost every other context but this one.

Politics has a way of reminding you of the difference between literal and figurative authority. Except, perhaps, in some conventioneers' fantasies, this wasn't the great Dirty Harry facing down some well-meaning dork of a community organizer. It was the former Mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea challenging the President of the United States, and that's the definition of deluding yourself. Check back with me the day Carmel has its own nuclear arsenal.