To Elaborate

 I wanted to expand on the post from last night, because as I was writing it a family travel emergency arose and had to be dealt with.

When we talk about "hidden government" what we should be differentiating is things that need to be messaged in one way, while hiding aspects of other achievements. So, Biden's relief plan that sends money to people - you need to crow about that. Trump putting his name on relief checks was likely a violation of the Hatch Act, but it was effective politics. There are plenty of popular things that Biden and the Democrats have done and they should be relentlessly pushing that stuff.

When it comes to other issues - and I would focus especially on race and gender/sexuality issues - I think it helps to be more subtle. For instance, police reform is popular, defund the police is not - though if you give a "defund the police" person a half hour to explain what they mean, many of their proposals are popular. Having mental health crisis intervention teams are a great idea, for instance. 

If you frame police reform within the context of Black Lives Matter, it will be unpopular with a large swatch of the American electorate. You can say that's bullshit and it is, but it's still a reality. A few weeks ago, Yglesias took on Obama's interview with Ezra Klein. He points out that Obama obscures some of the hard choices he made in his rhetoric surrounding race and immigration. Obama today is routinely derided by that activist base for soft-peddling those issues. Some of the reason why Obama walked a tightrope on race was the burden of being the first Black president, but that's only half the picture. As a Black politician, Obama was incredibly in tune with White America, in many ways more so than White politicians, who take it for granted.

Obama understood that he needed to avoid taking strong stances on racial, LGBT and immigration issues. You could not bear the burden of being "Barack Obama" and track hard to the left on important cultural issues. When Republicans labelled the Affordable Care Act "Obamacare," what they were hoping to do (and to some degree achieved) was to associated his health care reform with welfare handouts to African Americans. As time went by, and Obama retreated from the scene, ACA/Obamacare became more popular. It's true that the provisions became more understood, but it's also true that in rural White America, ACA is popular and Obamacare is not.

Biden and the Democratic Party has moved its rhetoric and policy to the left in response to the changing nature of its coalition. City dwellers, college graduates and to a lesser degree racial minorities are further to the left on cultural issues, so it makes some sense to reward your base. I'm glad that Biden is supporting the Trans Rights movement.

However, there is something to be said to crafting reform in a way that is invisible to the casual critics of "Woke" politics. The tension is - as I mentioned last night - that the activists want to trumpet the changes, whereas a savvy politician would prefer to whisper it into friendly ears. 

Biden, for instance, is doing a lot of Green Energy in his various infrastructure bills that have already passed. He will do more in whatever comes out of the Sausage Factory. What he is not doing is calling it a Green New Deal, a decent enough term but one that has already been poisoned by the Fox News Machine.

In 2022 and 2024, Democrats simply need to not get slaughtered in rural, White America. If they are losing rural counties 60-40 as opposed to 70-30, they retain control of the House and possibly build on the Senate. 

Bleeding the tension out of cultural issues is an excellent way to do this. Can Democrats do this?