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<H4>PATT MORRISON</H4>
<H1>Nothing Up Their Sleeves? Look Again</H1>
<H2>The old political presto chango.</H2>Patt Morrison<BR><BR>September 8,
2004<BR><BR>There's a famous old house in Hollywood and another famous old house
in Washington, D.C. They have a lot in common.<BR><BR>Both are big, rambling
places of not altogether original design; the one in Washington was essentially
from an English architecture book, and the one in Hollywood was essentially
copied from a Franco-Midwestern chateau in Redlands.<BR><BR>Both are for members
only, but if you know the right people, you can probably get invited
in.<BR><BR>And both are pretty much in the same line of work. The Magic Castle,
in Hollywood, does it for fun; the White House, in Washington, does it for —
whatever it is, it isn't fun. They're both in the business of fooling
people.<BR><BR>After a long weekend's glut of campaign trumpery and tomfoolery,
I wanted to ask an expert: Exactly how do they get away with that? The
candidates were on the road, and Bill Clinton was on painkillers, so there went
my primary sources. I had to look elsewhere for expertise.<BR><BR>Because
tricking people depends on something called misdirection — the art of making us
look over there while someone's getting away with something sneaky right here —
I called the magician Johnny Ace Palmer, master of misdirection. Johnny Ace is
playing in the "close-up" room at the Magic Castle this week. That's the center
ring, the chamber where no more than two dozen people are watching, trying to
"gotcha" the magician, like the Oval Office of magic.<BR><BR>He understood my
premise right off the bat. "It's absolutely true," he said. "I am in politics —
I'm a magician."<BR><BR>There are, he explained, many variants on misdirection.
The classic is tossing a rock into the bushes to distract a guard and sneaking
in the gate when the guard goes to investigate the noise. "It works really well,
and I see politicians doing it all the time," said Johnny Ace. <BR><BR>Don't
read this bit if you're going to catch Palmer's show. He begins by telling the
audience, "Here's my opener," and he pulls a bottle opener out from under his
scarf. <BR><BR>While the audience is rolling its eyes, he does his first trick.
As the onlookers refocus, he taps the scarf, clink clink, and produces a giant
Coke bottle, saying, "What good is an opener without something to open?"
<BR><BR>"All that," he said, "in the first 18 seconds." <BR><BR>If the Bush
folks ever find themselves out of work and Wal-Mart isn't hiring, I think they
could take the misdirection skills they learned with the Dazzling Dubya and
apply them at the Magic Castle:<BR><BR>• Abracadabra! Gay marriage, a
threat to the family! (While the middle-class family of any configuration is
threatened with its ever-lower slide down the income ladder.) <BR><BR>•
Ta-daaa!! Improved healthcare for seniors! (But don't take notice of the fact
that Medicare premiums are going up by 17% for millions of the elderly and
disabled.) <BR><BR>• Presto! 1.7 million new jobs! (Don't pay any
attention to the fact that we're still almost a million jobs short of the number
the nation had when President Bush took up residence in the White
House.)<BR><BR>• <I>Voila! </I>Open elections in Iraq and Afghanistan,
even during wartime! (But the GOP keynoter believes that campaigning during
wartime isn't constitutionally mandated — it's "Democrats' manic obsession to
bring down our commander in chief!") <BR><BR>• Stupendous! America is the
story of expanding liberty! (But at a New Mexico rally, if you wanted to hear
your vice president make the case for four more years, you had to sign a pledge
endorsing Bush.) <BR><BR>• Amazing! We have Saddam Hussein's pistol, right
here! (But pay no attention to the man behind the curtain as you are endlessly
told about weapons of mass destruction — there aren't any.)<BR><BR>I love the
Magic Castle, and I love the White House. I just wish that the voters and the
campaigns didn't need a brochure to tell the difference.<BR><BR>The Great
Prestidigitator, the Amazing Abe, who managed to be both a politician and
honest, was fond of pointing out that "you can fool some of the people all the
time" and so forth. But even Abe knew that eventually you run out of people to
fool and time to fool them. </FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>