Often, the best we can hope for is that our efforts draw a spotlight.
The program was never fully funded, and no one involved was accustomed to their technical daily work drawing a spotlight.
But now an eruption of low-tech troubles is drawing a spotlight to what lies behind the computer screen.
The Leggett decision drew a spotlight, though, said Gerald Treece, a professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston and a friend of Mr. Harmon's.
In their deaths, the couple, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, and his wife Rivka, 28, drew a spotlight on the Chabad faith (the terms Chabad and Lubavitch are used interchangeably) — and to the emissaries' growing presence around the world.
Roger Stevens, Jr., the founding chairman of the Kennedy Center, expressed hope that the Honors would "help build more enthusiasm for the performing arts," and it seemed that he had found a canny strategy for doing so; the big shots drew a spotlight toward artists like Rudolf Serkin or Merce Cunningham, who had no profile on the talk-show circuit.
This drew a spotlight not just on the use of deadly force, but on the enduring calamity that is skid row.
They have drawn a national spotlight on police killings of young black men.
But no dispute is obscure in the age of the Internet, so what might have been a local, if tearful, standoff has drawn a national spotlight, after Web postings by the aggrieved mother and her sister over an incident last Thursday crashed the Ronald McDonald House Web site in a deluge of recriminations.
