OBAMA OVEREXPOSED -- Just A Minute for August 5, 2008

Hello again –

 

It’s hard to escape political commentary in today’s sprint to the election. Verbage, like garbage, threatens to overcome us. Unfortunately we can’t pile it all up somewhere and capture all the hot air for winter heating. (Not intending to disparage any candidates out there.)  It’s just once you’ve eaten beans for dinner on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday it’s probably no surprise that by Thursday you don’t care a lot for more beans. (Unless you’re really hungry for some reason.)

 

Well, Obama’s Berlin speech has been and is the subject of intense scrutiny and analysis. Someone has pictured Obama saying to Michelle after his European trip: “Well, if that won’t do it I don’t know what will.” One of the things an experienced platform performer learns reasonably quickly if he or she trains in the art very long is you need to leave yourself some ‘headroom.’ That is somewhere to progress to… (not good grammar but you get the idea.)  When a soloist starts out on her or his nearly highest note and with the volume turned all the way up… the artist is in sad shape when the number, or play or dramatic speech calls for still more intensity and volume. You’ve already fired all your cannons and there’s nothing left in the magazine. That may be Obama’s plight as we wend our way through the Fall.

 

Once a performer gets more experience under his belt he learns to “pace himself” or save the max effort for where and when it will be needed. But now we’re getting into the fine points of performance. Some say there are people who are “just naturally” good – and there are. But for every one like that there are probably a hundred or a thousand who need some training and a coach. Blessed is the man (or woman) who discovers that early and is not too proud to take some lessons or coaching. One of my dearest friends who is now with the Lord, sang in many different church and performance situations. He never stopped ‘taking lessons’ from his voice coach.

 

OK… enough on that subject. Maybe when the weather gets cooler we’ll get a break from the shards of rhetoric that threaten the season… but I doubt it. Everyone thinks if a 15 minute speech is good…then 30 minutes must be twice as good. But any preacher who has neared the end of an overlong sermon and suddenly discovered his audience has left him – if not in person at least in spirit – can testify to the accuracy of that observation.  Have a great day.

 

Cordially, IN HIM

 

Jack

 

http://www.jebcovoice.net/audio/jama08-05-08.mp3

 

http://www.jebcovoice.net/scripts/jamt08-05-08.doc

 

 

“JUST A MINUTE”

OBAMA OVEREXPOSED 

Just A Minute – George Will is one of America’s premier essayists. In a recent piece on Obama’s Berlin performance he leveled the assessment: (quote) “Measured against his party's surging strength in every region and at every level, he is dramatically underperforming.”

He goes on to ask if Obama has the sort of adviser … “sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much?” Will adds: “Even an eloquent politician can become, as Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone, ‘a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.’ ”

And finally judges Obama nears self-parody [leaving] No Metaphor Behind (quote) "Walls"? Down with them. "Bridges? Build new ones between this and that. "A new dawn? The Middle East deserves one.”  – Will opines: and quoted … “the most absurd, proposition ever penned by a political philosopher, Thomas Paine's ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ No. We. Don't, “ saith George Will in the Washington Post !

<> I’m Jack Buttram

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