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Clint Eastwood's RNC Obama chair gets own Twitter account

Wow. It doesn't take long for Twitter to tap into the cultural zeitgeist. Invisible Obama, fast made famous at tonight's RNC, gets an account that goes from zero to nearly 20K followers in less than an hour.

Leslie Katz Former Culture Editor
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Leslie Katz
2 min read
Screenshot by Dan Farber/CNET

You know that wooden chair Clint Eastwood was talking to during tonight's speech at the Republican National Convention? It already has its own Twitter account. At least two actually.

For those who might have missed it (but expect to hear plenty about it during upcoming RNC post-mortems), the iconic action actor spent part of his moment in the convention spotlight chatting (transcript) with an empty chair that was supposed to represent President Obama. And if presidents can have their own Twitter accounts, why can't chairs that are standing in as presidents?

Invisible Obama (bio: Stage left of Clint Eastwood) sent out its first Tweet at about 6:20 p.m. PT. It's been busy tweeting since: "The GOP built me." "When Mitt Romney says 'Mr. Chairman', do you think he's referring to me?"

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who introduced Gov. Romney, quickly followed Eastwood to the stage. Invisible Obama was present. As of this writing, the account had more than 22,000 followers.

 
Screenshot by Dan Farber/CNET

Also among the masses tweeting away their real-time RNC impressions: Clint's Empty Chair, which as of now has just over 1,500 followers, far fewer than Invisible Obama, but is still getting one-liners in.

"Geez Clint...I think you were mad at the faulty teleprompter, not me," read a tweet that clearly referred to a speech some have dubbed as rambling and that wasn't exactly well received by the press and pundits covering the convention. Don't worry, however, Eastwood fans. He did get in a "make my day."

The Romney campaign issued the following statement: "Judging an American icon like Clint Eastwood through a typical political lens doesn't work. His ad libbing was a break from all the political speeches, and the crowd enjoyed it. He rightly pointed out that 23 million Americans out of work or underemployed is a national disgrace and it's time for a change."

Clint Eastwood's RNC speech got plenty of reaction on Twitter. Screenshot by Dan Farber/CNET