No, he really couldn't. This was a very carefully scripted performance, and done that way for a reason. He played the role of a rambling old man in order to show that even a rambling old man can figure out what a fraud Obama is. It was done with some biting humor, for the purpose of turning an Alinsky tactic against Obama and the Dems.
FYI, I don't think for a minute that a guy who is producing and acting in movies like Clint has been is in the least bit senile - but a good actor can project about any image and get his audience to believe it.
The best thing he did was to definitively show that not everyone in Hollyweird is a foaming-at-the-mouth radical Leftist.
According to this article it was not scripted: http://www.pineconearchive.com/120907-1.html
Fortunately, taking the entire speech into context and the liberal heads exploding in its aftermath, it was a brilliant stroke of genius!
To Ancesthntr: You should get a job as a Fox Analyst. You understood what Eastwood was doing while others including some conservatives, totally missed the message you wrote about.
Eastwood is no dummy. He picks his targets carefully and hits them head-on. Just look at his movies, his carefully phrased messages about crime, liberals, and our enemies (”Heartbreak Ridge”, for one).
He and his writers have given us the most memorable lines about social and political issues of any individual actor.
“Go ahead, make my day”
“Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?
“This is a 44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world”
And unfortunately the one he left out of the RNC speech, about Obama, was:
“A man’s got to know his limitations”.
When Obama loses in a landslide in November, we will all be singing “Play Misty for Me”.
As for me, I’ll be playing Annie Lennox’s “Would You Lie to Me” about a thousand times, saying, “Yes, Obama - you did!”
Excuse me but I have a meeting with one Madame LaFarge. Something to do with what we need to do after the election, something about getting a-head as soon as possible.