October 7, 2008 --
CLINT Eastwood made it clear who won last week's vice-presidential debate in an interview he did Saturday as part of The New Yorker Festival with the magazine's legendary Lillian Ross.
"One of the candidates the other night seemed more prone to telling the truth than the other," Eastwood said. The cheese-and-Chardonnay crowd laughed, presumably because they thought he meant Joe Biden.
But the laughs among the 300 worshipful movie buffs at the Directors Guild theater dried up when Ross interjected, "I liked her, too!"
Eastwood went on to talk about how well "she" did, although he stopped short of a ringing endorsement.
The Post's Kyle Smith asked Eastwood, who describes himself as a libertarian, what qualities he believed would be ideal in a presidential candidate.
Eastwood, a former mayor of Carmel, Calif., quoted James Cagney as saying, "Plant your feet, and tell the truth."
The Oscar winner complained politics was "such a smoke-and-mirrors kind of thing these days . . . They all have the BS factor because that's the nature of politics . . . I don't know when this all started, but it's promising, 'What can we give you? If I get in, I'm gonna give you a check.' And people think that's great, but what's gonna happen on the other end?"
Eastwood also said he recently met John McCain at a social event and joked to the GOP candidate: "Don't even ask it - I will not be a vice-presidential candidate." He later said, more seriously, "You have to sell your soul" to be vice president, calling it "the least appealing job."
The "Dirty Harry" icon's latest movie, the feminist period drama "Changeling," with Angelina Jolie, opens this month. In December comes "Gran Torino," in which Eastwood reappears as an actor, playing "a total racist."
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