“More Americans know a pink ribbon is the symbol of breast cancer than know the name of the vice president of the United States. They more often identify the nonprofit Susan G. Komen (Komen) as a funder of breast cancer research than they do the National Institutes of Health—the single largest funder of breast cancer research” (p. 1). So begins Patricia Strach’s excellent and thought-provoking study of corporate partnerships for social good. Strach neatly summarizes the puzzle: No one wants more breast cancer, but how should we collectively fight it, and how much should we fight this particular scourge compared to others? In the pink world (as she calls the network surrounding Komen), the consensus is that breast cancer can be whipped by individual action. People come together in corporate-sponsored walk-a-thons and in grocery stores buying goods stamped with a pink ribbon, knowing that they are doing their part to end cancer. Congressional candidates wear pink ribbons to signal their concern with women’s issues. The Postal Service sells pink-ribbon stamps. The tone is hopeful, the focus is on individual empowerment, consensus, and doing our part for a good cause in a convenient, nonconfrontational, low-cost way. We buy a different breakfast cereal; we whip cancer. We buy a stamp; cancer suffers.

Notably absent in the pink world are debates. Debates might involve exactly how to attack the scourge: more screenings, or more focus on keeping potential carcinogens out of consumer products, our water, and the environment? More funding for pink, or more for heart or lung disease, each of which has a higher mortality rate among women? More funding for research, or lobbying for more health insurance for the poor, which might encourage more women to have regular doctors’ visits? Save lives with a walk-a-thon, or protest against war, guns, and violence? Each time, pink wins out, without controversy, without debate, without discussion.

No policy entrepreneur or sponsor of a social movement has to apologize for winning. Strach does not suggest that the pink movement has the responsibility to assess all the needs of American society and allocate attention, resources, and effort equitably to those issues that affect us in proper proportions. But, she notes, the vast corporate sponsorship that stands behind the pink world, for all the good it does (and she acknowledges this good), also distorts our political life. Corporations do not want to be associated with conflict, with fights, with antagonism, with (alert: here comes a dirty word) politics.

The fight against cancer is a political fight. The National Institutes of Health are at the forefront of it. Government funding decisions affecting basic science, higher education, medicine, treatment, access to health insurance, community health, environmental regulation, and a great variety of other items directly affect cancer. But in the pink world, we do not talk about any of these things. And of course, the world of government is messy because governments have to decide on trade-offs: How does cancer research rate compared to other issues, such as K–12 education, trade, and jobs? That is a problem in government, and in politics, but it is not a pink problem.

One sign of an excellent book is that it asks questions that others have not asked, and here Strach scores a home run. The question is not completely novel of course, but her treatment of it is very refreshing. She is a Schattschneiderian at heart, starting with an assumption that containing conflict is just as interesting (and portentous) as expanding it. So, following E. E. Schattschneider’s Semisovereign People (1960), she focuses on the implications of conflict restriction. What is off the table? In the pink world, many things are, including democratic deliberation and trade-offs. On the table are feel-good, low-cost, optimistic, consensual options. Who knows which is more effective against cancer?

Is it fair to point out that the pink world dominates? Yes and no. Strach is fair. She does not blame activists and sponsors in the pink world for their success. Congratulations to them. As she points out, they have taken an issue that was taboo as recently as the 1980s and brought it into the light. Her critiques are not complaints about the winners. Rather, she points out the systematic tendencies within the U.S. political system to allow corporate actors privileged access to the agenda, and the implications of this. Because the agenda is scarce, and because issues framed one way cannot simultaneously be framed another way, each winner creates losers. She is looking for these losers, a task akin to looking for a dog that does not bark. But they are easy to find here because the outsized actor dressed in pink has become such a dominant force. Other issues, other spending priorities, other needs shared by millions of women, and other ways of looking at breast cancer and the most helpful approaches to minimizing its impact are pushed aside.

Strach addresses these issues with a multimethod approach. She begins with a chapter explaining the concept of “cause marketing” and develops a national survey to explain how Americans interact with it. She compares the cause-marketing campaigns over 25 years with governmental priorities, based on a new database she created, noting how they distort the agenda. This distortion comes in two forms: selecting simple and consensual issues, rather than the full range of governmental concern, and suggesting that they are even simpler and more easily fixable than they are. And Americans believe them, of course. She documents a distortion not only in what is discussed in the public sphere but also in how average Americans come to understand important policy issues. Cause marketing works. Americans believe these campaigns. Naturally, if it works in the mass public, it also works in Washington, and she shows in her penultimate chapter that the pink explanation of breast cancer has dominated the lobbying and policymaking world, promoting the same kinds of views as cause-marketing campaigns typically do.

Hiding Politics in Plain Sight has many important implications. Its most obvious audience is the group interested in her running case study, those interested in health-care policymaking and breast cancer. But the book’s value lies in bringing our attention to the importance of attention. For every successful lobbying campaign able to bring our attention to a given issue and from a certain frame, who loses? Even when no one is directly opposed, entrepreneurial success for one means that another issue is squeezed off the political agenda or lands on the budgetary cutting floor. More powerfully, the book is about corporate influence in politics. Even when doing good, corporate power needs to be understood for what it is: outsized in comparison with that of average Americans and social movements that cannot generate a corporate consensus. Such influence deserves our attention and understanding. Patricia Strach has given us a new lens through which to see some of the more subtle but most powerful elements of corporate influence: framing complex issues as simple, deathly ones as hopeful and optimistic, and conflictual ones as simply not worth worrying about.