Clint Eastwood empty chair speech goes viral

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Mitt Romney officially accepted the Republican Party presidential nomination Thursday night, but one of the Bay's Areas very own stole the show. Clint Eastwood's speech has turned into an online sensation.

Where before there was planking, owling and Tebowing, after last night's speech by Eastwood where he talked to an empty chair as if it was President Barack Obama, there is a new trend -- Eastwooding.

As if it was foreshadowing, Eastwood came on stage to the theme song from his classic film "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." And a few minutes into his speech an empty chair turned into an odd co-star.

"I've got Mr. Obama sitting here, and he's, I was just going to ask him a few questions," Eastwood said.

The seemingly unscripted conversation was not without some serious subject matter, but it often veered into the bizarre, with Eastwood waiting for fill-in-the-blank reactions from the empty chair.

"What do you want me to tell Romney? I can't tell him to do that, that would be, he can't do that to himself," Eastwood said.

Eastwood's primetime chat with the chair has turned into a moment of inspiration online. Eastwooding became a popular hashtag on Twitter with people posting photos of themselves scolding empty chairs. And almost immediately after Eastwood left the stage, a Twitter account called (at)InvisibleObama was launched and had 20,000 followers in just 45 minutes.

Even Obama himself appeared to react to Eastwood's speech, the Twitter account run by his campaign staff sent out a photo of Obama sitting in a chair with a placard labeled "The President" captioned "This seat's taken."

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celebrity, 2012 presidential race, republicans, twitter, barack obama, politics

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