As a Democrat, she has a limited ability to influence legislation, but she has taken a lead in forming the debate on a number of issues of substance.
Regarding this issue, language doesn't just form the debate, language is the debate, and there has been a severe reluctance to call our actions what they actually are, to our national detriment.
In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?
In its simplest form, the debate between traditional and behavioral finance comes down to the difference between two sets of investment recommendations: if you believe the efficient market hypothesis, don't try to beat the market by picking individual stocks, just invest in index funds.
Another current issue may also take a new form: the debate about the social advantages or disadvantages of "conformity". The stereotype of the conforming junior executive, more interested in being well liked than in working, should become far less significant in a highly depersonalized, highly programed, and more machine-like middle-management world.
One group, Shape the Debate, formed by associates of Pete Wilson, the former governor and a Republican, ran a $1.5 million campaign in California in which Mr. Gore was mocked in a pseudo game show called Hypocrisy.
Some supporters of Mr. Bush have also formed a group called Shape the Debate and run ads attacking Vice President Al Gore.
You don't tear up your fire insurance because your house has been flooded.Such arguments will form the debates of a new era of shadow war.
Just one month after the publication of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," the fourth in J. K. Rowling's projected seven-book series, battle lines are already forming in the debate over the literary merit of the Potter books.
What is perhaps the most interesting form of the debate occurs when we take the relevant subject to be truths about the external world, the world beyond our own minds.
