While he was talking primarily in the context of healthcare, Thomas Sowell recently praised Barack Obama's skill as a magician.

Just as magicians know that the secret of some of their tricks is to distract the audience, so politicians know that the secret of many political tricks is to distract the public with scapegoats.

No one is more of a political magician than Barack Obama. At the beginning of 2008, no one expected a shrewd and experienced politician like Hillary Clinton to be beaten for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States by someone completely new to the national political scene. But Obama worked his political magic, with the help of the media, which he still has.

Barack Obama's escapes from his own past words, deeds and associations have been escapes worthy of Houdini.

Like other magicians, Obama has chosen his distractions well. The insurance industry is currently his favorite distraction as scapegoats, after he has tried to demonize doctors without much success.

But as distractions go, the condom issue is relatively minor. To see a major issue like socialized medicine being used as a distraction is new, and worrisome.

If issues are becoming distractions instead of issues, this complicates analysis as never before.

Even before I read the Thomas Sowell piece, I was wondering about Barack Obama's wisdom in making immigration the Next Big Issue.

Michael Barone argues that it's a bad idea, because the timing is poor, it won't help the Democrats politically, and illegal immigration rate has been dramatically dropping:

Before leaving for his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Barack Obama said the next big item on his legislative agenda -- well, after health care, cap and trade, and maybe labor's bill to effectively abolish secret ballots in union elections -- was immigration reform. What he has in mind, apparently, is something like the comprehensive immigration bills that foundered in the House in 2006 and in the Senate in 2007. These featured guest-worker and enforcement provisions, as well as a path to legalization.

The prospects for such legislation still seem iffy. Immigration bills have typically needed bipartisan support to pass, and the Republicans who took the lead on the Senate bills in 2006 and 2007 aren't interested in doing so again. And some Democratic congressional leaders are wary of a bill that many members' constituents oppose.

But there's another reason why Congress and the administration would be unwise to revive the 2006-07 legislation. The facts on the ground have changed. The surge of illegal immigrants into the United States, which seemed to be unrelenting for most of the last two decades, seems to be over, at least temporarily, and there's a chance it may never resume.

But what if the idea is not to pass legislation, but something else? If this is a distraction, might the idea be to bolster a narrative? And what better narrative than the old, tried-and-tested, conservatives are racists meme? I'm thinking that the left might just be drooling over another opportunity to cast the opposition as racist bigots, and if that's the goal, then reviving this issue might have little to do with actually getting legislation passed. In fact, if it failed, its defeat could be blamed on conservative Republican Tea Party redneck racism -- a distraction the media would be all too glad to further.

distract the public with scapegoats?

From the standpoint of timing, I can think of few better scapegoats than "right wing racism." The left has been trying desperately to portray opposition to health care as racism, but they have failed. There's just something about all that massive, tedious bureaucracy, debates over Medicare, whose insurance will cover what (along with the complex 1000 page bill that no one has read) that just defies being crammed into any sort of race narrative.

Immigration, though, offers a perfect fit with the narrative.

If the goal is a distraction rather than legislation, little wonder it's the Next Big "Issue."