The Latest Annoying Media Buzzword: Shellacking

From the transcript of President Obama’s press conference, November 3, 2010:

…I’m not recommending for every future President that they take a shellacking… like I did last night. (Laughter.) I’m sure there are easier ways to learn these lessons. But I do think that this is a growth process and an evolution. And the relationship that I’ve had with the American people is one that built slowly, peaked at this incredible high, and then during the course of the last two years, as we’ve, together, gone through some very difficult times, has gotten rockier and tougher. And it’s going to, I’m sure, have some more ups and downs during the course of me being in this office.

Apparently the media just loved the word the President used to describe the results of the midterm elections, because they just can’t stop repeating it. Over and over and over again. Some examples:

Christian Science Monitor: After ‘shellacking,’ can foreign policy be a bright spot for Obama?

USA Today: Obama’s ‘shellacking’ — how badly will it bruise his agenda?

Fox News: Despite the shellacking, Obama keeping his team intact

Yesterday, on NPR’s All Things Considered, Robert Siegel and Michele Norris discussed the word “shellacking” and tried to determine how the word came to mean “a decisive defeat.”

ROBERT SIEGEL: A shellacking – that is, a decisive defeat, according to Merriam-Webster’s. The term has an old-timey feel to it, like something used by a stern father decades ago.

MICHELLE NORRIS: Maybe that’s because it has an older meaning: a finish for furniture made with lac – L-A-C – as in lacquer.

SIEGEL: You mean lac, a resinous secretion of an insect deposited on trees and used in making shellac, a varnish.

NORRIS: Thanks, Random House.

SIEGEL: So how did shellac make the linguistic leap to defeat? Jesse Sheidlower, of the Oxford English Dictionary, was half-expecting our call about this today. But he didn’t find a definitive answer. He ruled out origins in sports. And he said shellac smelled of alcohol and became slang for drunk. He says it was prison slang.

NORRIS: From crime to politics, meaning washed up or trounced – which is, in case you missed it, exactly what happened to the Democratic Party in Tuesday’s elections.

I don’t know about you, but I’m already really sick of the word “shellacking.” I do think Robert Siegel had interesting point, though, when he said the word had “an old-timey feel to it, like something used by a stern father decades ago.”

During the campaign, Obama was painted as being “cool,” but his use of language since he became President does come across as old-fashioned and very uncool–as with his frequent use of the term “folks” to refer to ordinary Americans.

It would be interesting to know where Obama gets these words. Do they come from speechwriter Jon Favreau or from the President himself? If they are Obama’s own words, where did he pick them up? Did they come from his grandfather or grandmother?

In any case, we are likely to keep reading and hearing this new buzzword for some time to come. It will even get more widespread publicity Sunday night, since Obama has taped an interview with 60 Minutes, and the “shellacking” will be discussed at length.

Unfortunately the President’s rationalization for the “shellacking” is either deliberately obtuse or utterly tone-deaf, as usual. Nevertheless, we’ll probably be hearing his ridiculous explanation repeated again and again too. He told 60 Minutes’ Steve Croft that the big problem was not his policies, but his failure to explain his policies to us.

Obama: What I didn’t effectively, I think, drive home, because we were in such a rush to get this stuff done, is that we were taking these steps not because of some theory that we wanted to expand government. It was because we had an emergency situation and we wanted to make sure the economy didn’t go off a cliff.

The president also tells Kroft that one of the reasons the electorate has become disenchanted with him was his failure to properly explain his policies and persuade people to agree with them.

It was, in effect, a breakdown in leadership: “Leadership isn’t just legislation,” he tells Kroft.

Supposedly, if the President had only explained all of his policies to us poor clueless voters, we would have understood that he knew what was best for us and would gladly have rushed to the polls to vote for Democrats. Here’s another quote from the interview:

“You know, I think that over the course of two years we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that leadership isn’t just legislation. That it’s a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand. And I think that we haven’t always been successful at that. And I take personal responsibility for that. And it’s something that I’ve got to examine carefully as I go forward.”

See, if he had very clearly spelled out why it was so important to keep a public option out of the health care bill, and why it was vital that the bill should prevent women from getting abortions in the future, everything would have been hunky-dory. And if he had more clearly explained why we needed to stay in Iraq instead of withdrawing as he had repeatedly promised, and why we needed a “surge” in Afghanistan and lots more civilian and military deaths, then voters would have seen things completely differently.

In his press conference, Obama also argued that one message of the midterm results is that he needs to get out of the White House more often. In response to a question about his leadership style, the President said:

There is a inherent danger in being in the White House and being in the bubble. I mean, folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year. And they got a pretty good look at me up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires, and I think they understood that my story was theirs. I might have a funny name, I might have lived in some different places, but the values of hard work and responsibility and honesty and looking out for one another that had been instilled in them by their parents, those were the same values that I took from my mom and my grandparents.

And so the track record has been that when I’m out of this place, that’s not an issue. When you’re in this place, it is hard not to seem removed. And one of the challenges that we’ve got to think about is how do I meet my responsibilities here in the White House, which require a lot of hours and a lot of work, but still have that opportunity to engage with the American people on a day-to-day basis, and know — give them confidence that I’m listening to them.

There’s another clueless rationalization! So he’s going to try to get out of Washington even more than he did in the first two years of his presidency? It’s hard for me to imagine how he could get away any more than he already has. But if Obama does actually appear at more town hall meetings, it might be helpful if he actually listened to some real Americans instead of lecturing them endlessly on how stupid they are not to see the wonderfulness of his policies.

What I haven’t seen so far is any sign that Obama intends to make any substantive changes following the “shellacking” Democrats received at the polls on Tuesday. The “core” group of White House staffers will stay on, even though many Democrats have been pushing for a real shakeup of Obama’s primary advisers.

A Democratic strategist characterized the lack of change at the White House as “willful defiance.” The strategist, who discussed the issue on condition of anonymity, said, “The political operation from top to bottom, north to south, east to west, needs to be really carefully looked at.”

Even within the White House, some aides have objected to what they see as an insular culture. Obama’s practice of grooming understudies to fill big White House jobs is also under fire.

“The president needs a broader range of views on a daily basis than he’s gotten up till now,” said William Galston, a onetime aide to President Clinton and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “One reason that Ronald Reagan succeeded as president was that he got out of his comfort zone when he appointed senior people, and I think this president needs some people around him who are prepared to challenge not only his policy instincts but his political instincts. The idea of constructing the White House simply by promoting from within is simply ridiculous.”

At the Financial Times, Anna Fifield writes that even after the famous “shellacking,”

…“No Drama Obama” has maintained his generally cool demeanour – no Bill Clinton-style emoting for him – and given little indication that he intends significantly to alter his modus operandi.

Although the president said he was “doing a whole lot of reflecting” on the electoral rout, he suggested the problem was with communications, rather than his core policies.

As long as Obama claims the only problem has been his failure to communicate the wonderfulness of his policies, I guess we aren’t going to see any real changes.

Fifield also reveals that President Obama has been reading Taylor Branch’s book about the Clinton years.

“President Clinton was very aggressive – he did a series of bipartisan accords and turned things around,” said Mark Penn, the pollster who helped Mr Clinton recover from the 1994 rout.

Mr Obama revealed that he has been reading historian Taylor Branch’s book about Mr Clinton’s years in the White House, although it remains to be seen whether he will follow suit.

“The real question is whether or not the president [Obama] will learn from what the voters are saying, because two years is a long time in politics,” Mr Penn said.

Aaaak!!! Why do I think Obama will learn the wrong lessons from that book? I think he may be headed for another “shellacking” in 2012.