The key to a magic trick is distraction: the magician tries to draw his audience’s attention to some irrelevant place while he executes his trick elsewhere. A politician with a lousy record is much like an amateur magician. He tries to get his audience, voters, to focus on something–anything!–other than his record in office. That is the mode that Barack Obama is in these days, as manifested by his monomaniacal dedication to the Buffett Ploy. Michael Ramirez puts Obama’s effort at distraction in context:
