Looking forward to 2004, liberals and progressives have become embroiled in an argument over whether Democrats ought to embrace or reject populism. Pro-business moderates -- or, more precisely, anti-anti-business moderates -- have lambasted Al Gore's 2000 campaign for overemphasizing "economic populism" and for slighting the "pro-growth" agenda advanced by the Democratic Leadership Conference and its current leader, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.).

In a pathbreaking study of the mass media and modern culture, The Image, first published in 1961, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin coined the term "pseudo-event." A pseudo-event, Boorstin wrote, is "not spontaneous ... but planned, planted, or incited"--an event whose "occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media," and whose "relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous."