President Joe Biden has finally embraced the popular moniker for his economic plan. "What the press has now called ‘Bidenomics,’” he said in a June 17 speech. “I don’t know what the hell that is. But it’s working."

Biden is being coy. He most certainly knows what Bidenomics is. The problem is, voters don’t. So Biden will be canvassing the country this summer and fall, telling voters what he has accomplished and trying to brighten the sour national mood. This is the start of Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.

Voters seems to think Biden is doddering and ineffective. They’re wrong about that. Though his gaffes are legendary, Biden is moving the needle on issues that have stumped prior presidents. The overhyped standoff over raising the US borrowing limit ended up a non-event because Biden outmaneuvered the chaos wing of the Republican party that would have been content with a catastrophic default.

During his first two years in office, Biden negotiated and signed several major bills that will reshape the US energy, automotive and semiconductor industries for years. He did this with the smallest possible majority for his Democratic party in the Senate.

What is Bidenomics? It’s the use of government power to steer the economy in a new direction and address perceived market failures of the last 30 years. Globalization, for instance, has hollowed out America’s blue-collar workforce as a lot of manufacturing has moved overseas. So Biden’s Democrats have passed legislation with powerful incentives to bring key types of manufacturing back to the United States, with preferences for firms that employ unionized workers.

In the Biden view, capitalism is reacting too slowly to climate change and the need to slash carbon emissions. So the Inflation Reduction Act Biden signed last year will provide hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives for power producers and consumers to pivot to green energy. Again, there’s a preference for union workers.

The 2022 CHIPS Act is supposed to reestablish high-end semiconductor manufacturing in the United States and combat China’s growing economic power. The 2021 infrastructure law Biden signed is the biggest effort in decades to refurbish roads and bridges and build new structures, again, with an emphasis on renewable energy and union jobs.

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Biden also plans to use powerful regulatory agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to tilt the economy toward working-class Americans and promote renewable energy. All told, it’s a couple trillion dollars in fiscal spending backed by muscular regulation and enforcement. As an expedient afterthought, Biden claims all of this will somehow help lower inflation.

Whether Bidenomics will work is far from certain. "The challenge of selling and implementing Bidenomics is that it’s full of competing priorities," Beacon Policy Advisors wrote in a June 23 analysis. "Trying to tackle climate change, be pro-labor, and lower inflation is a Rubik’s Cube. Trying to appease everyone can often end up satisfying no one."

The consequences of Bidenomics are starting to become visible—with supporters and critics both claiming vindication. On June 22, for instance, the Energy Department said a Ford Motor Co. joint venture would receive a $9.2 billion low-interest loan to help build two electric-vehicle battery plants in Kentucky and one in Tennessee. That’s the largest loan of its type the government has ever issued.

The loan money does not come from new Biden legislation, but one of the main reasons Ford wants to build vast numbers of EVs is a generous set of incentives in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act that will sharply lower the cost to buyers and likely boost demand. Ford says the loan will support 7,500 new jobs.

China hawks applauded the move as a necessary US response to massive government subsidies China’s communist government offers to businesses and industries it deems nationally significant. But the fusty Wall Street Journal editorial board decried the loan as a perversion of capitalism and declared Ford a "prisoner of government."

There’s probably no single right answer. Government subsidies do inject political calculations into business decisions and cause the inefficient allocation of capital, as the Journal points out. But capitalism isn’t geared toward solving global warming or countering China’s own economic warfare, pushing those issues into the realm of public policy. Bidenomics is the search for government solutions to problems the market hasn’t been able to fix.

There are going to be a lot of new deals and development along the lines of the huge green-energy loan for Ford. A US factory boom is underway as hundreds of businesses seek to cash in on the gusher of incentives from Washington. Some businesses that get sweetheart government deals are bound to fail, prompting howls of protests about squandered taxpayer dollars.

But it also seems possible a genuine "manufacturing supercycle" is underway, with benefits finally accruing to blue-collar workers and other middle-income Americans who have been falling behind in the 21st century. It might not be the most efficient allocation of capital, but it might be necessary all the same.

Biden’s dismal approval rating indicates voters aren’t giving him much credit for this, so far. His job as a presidential candidate, once again, is to convince voters he’s transforming the economy to better serve the majority of Americans. That begins with explaining what Bidenomics is and why it’s necessary in the first place. Biden’s third and fourth years in office will be dedicated to explaining what he did during the first two.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman

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