The title of this article wouldn't be news if papers like the Times covered and represented labor in a manner anything like the way they cover and represent business - but the article's quite good.

Democracy. A Jewish state. The West Bank and the Gaza strip. Given demographic reality, Israel can have any two out of three. Meir Kahane pushed Israel to give up the first; Tony Jundt recently stirred up controversy in this country pushing for giving up the second. The reason I call for Israel to keep the first two and give up the third is because it's the only solution that's received majority support on both sides. Now the New York Times is suggesting that Sharon's right-wing Likud party is coming to the same conclusion. I would love to believe that they're right.

This NY Times piece - "Mr. Inside Embraces Mr. Outside, and What a Surprise" is one of many analyses that will no doubt proliferate over the next few days trying to explain Gore's endorsement. I think Purdum is on the right track in noting Gore's drastic shift to the left since the 2000 election, as well as his series of strident condemnations of Bush policy over the past months. These have been, by turns, gratifying and maddening, I think it's safe to say, to those of us who were exasperated with Gore for leaving so little ideological distinction between himself and Bush during the actual campaign. Gore's piece in the Times after the Enron scandal tying corporate malfeseance to Bush's corporate politics made the right case - but it's a case that, contrary to what that piece also said - Gore never made on the campaign trail. Those conservatives who think (occasionally rightly) that they can convince American voters that the main fault line in their politics is between civil and uncivil politicians have tried to use Gore's move to the left as evidence that he's bitter and angry at his personal loss. I think it's much more that Gore, like Clinton and other New Democrats, recognize the appeal of Old Democrat values and so fall back on them once out of office both to bring nobility to their legacy and to convince themselves that they at least lost because they stood for something and not because they didn't. Dean's aggressive condemnations of the failings of this administration fit the message that Gore has claimed for himself since 2000. So it's shouldn't be surprising to see him endorsing someone who's ready to carry that message forward - and to see him endorsing the candidate who's running the kind of campaign now that many wanted him to run four years ago. What Purdum's analysis for the Times fails to mention, however, is what may really be the most compelling reason for Gore to endorse Dean now: he's winning. Gore, in the same way as, say SEIU, gains power from picking late enough to choose the one who'll win and early enough to be as formative in that victory as possible. Gore specifically, however, has the chance by endorsing Dean to merge their narratives - one populist fighter has the election narrowly stolen but four years later another arises to take it back - and drown out the alternative - the New Democrat establishment fouls up an election and it's left to a populist outsider to ride in four years later to fix it. Purdum asks whether this will hurt Gore's credibility, and I think the answer is no more than Gore's already hurt his credibility by governing and campaigning from the center and then moving to the left since. More importantly, he asks whether this will hurt Dean's candidacy, and I don't think it will measurably. Dean has successfully enough framed himself as an outside-the-beltway candidate, and campaigned that way long enough, that I think this will come off more as the beltway coming around to the Governor of Vermont than the other way around. More fundamentally, I think candidates can be effectively criticized, in extreme cases, for not repudiating deeply objectionable folks who endorse them, but that otherwise criticizing them for who endorses them is difficult to pull off. I think that Al Gore's endorsement will give Dean's critics on the left about as much ammunition as Jesse Jackson Jr.'s, Ted Rall's, Molly Ivins', William Greider's, et al gave his critics on the right: not a whole lot, in the long term. Speaking as one of those critics on the left, that Dean got Gore's endorsement says to me just that he's an effective organizer. Gore endorsing Dean may give some added momentum and visibility to Sharpton and Kucinich's campaigns, which could only be good for the Democratic party, but I don't see any of the other candidates positioned at this point to use it to frame themselves as the independent choice. What this endorsement does, as I see it, is move a slew of voters to consider Dean - or to consider him seriously - who hadn't before, and deflate much of the criticism from DLCers and others of Dean as unelectable or out of the mainstream. Much as Jackson's hashkachah (certification, roughly translated) marks Dean kosher for some to his left, Gore's will mark him kosher for some to his right. And it may mean that the Democratic establishment is learning not only the lesson of 2002 - what happens when you offer no viable alternative - but also the lesson of 1972 - what happens when the party leadership abandons the party's candidate.

Today marks the debut of the New York Times' Public Editor. This is a concept with which I think few "small d" democrats could take issue, and I'm curious to see how his eighteen-month term plays out. I think it's fair, however, to express concern, given the Times' and the rest of the media establishment's tendency to lend much more credence to the Times' critics on the right than to its critics on the left, with whether Okrent's aspirations to represent you effectively when you have a complaint about The Times's integrity will cover the full spectrum of the Times' readership. Okrent's suggestion that the media risks ...the boiling resentment toward men and women in power that can arise... in journalism - that the media is too muckracking - suggests that the bias of a corporate media establishment too often in bed with a corporate political establishment isn't the top one on his list.

The New York Times Magazine, in its cover story, makes an awkward, leering, occasionally illuminating, mostly misguided attempt to understand the grassroots movement that (deserved or not) has built around Howard Dean. What's most stunning is the incredulity and confusion with which the Times confronts the prospect that politics could be built around - and create - communities, and that it could arise from and inform personal narratives in ways other than serving as a tool for the performance of privilege. Much of the article is full of accounts of bad break-ups meant to make these folks look pathetic and descriptions of personal eccentricities meant to make them look perverse: He stripped to his underwear, lay on the floor in a fetal position and remained there for days, occasionally sipping from an old carton of orange juice. ''I was completely obliterated,'' he says. ''I didn't know something like that could actually cause physical pain.'' Johnson's friends kept calling, trying to think of something that would get him out of the house. Finally they hit on one: Howard Dean. This paragraph, however, is perhaps more absurd: It felt as much like a support group as a political rally. As they did at Clay Johnson's meet-up in Atlanta, everyone went around the circle describing what drew them to Dean, usually in very personal language. Bob and Eileen Ehlers haltingly explained the problems their children, in their 20's, have with health insurance, while Tony Evans nodded sympathetically. That the most reputable newspaper in the US sees people choosing to get involved in campaigns based on personal experience and personal struggles as pathological is sad. That this is seen as a bleeding heart newspaper is just absurd. There's also Howard Dean as siren: Long before Howard Dean was considered a plausible candidate for president, he seemed to emit some sort of secret call that made people, many of them previously apolitical, drop everything and devote themselves to his campaign. Yet the Times also acknowledges that whatever this strategy is, it seems to be working: By organizing its national network of Yogis, Howards, Dykes and Disney Employees for Dean, the campaign built an alternative to institutions like the D.L.C. Dean has raised $25 million, mostly through small checks -- the average donation is $77 -- and those checks have placed Dean at the top of the Democratic fund-raising pack. Dean's opponents have begun to mimic the trappings of his campaign. Many of the Democratic candidates now have blogs. Even President Bush has one, though comments from the public -- an essential element of Dean's blog -- are not allowed. The article's close suggests a glimmering, even at the New York Times Magazine, of understanding of what a grassroots campaign could be: ''What's happening is an unusual and unprecedented correspondence between the campaign and us,'' she says. It takes me a moment before I realize that when she says ''the campaign,'' she doesn't mean the people running the headquarters in Burlington. She means the people she's going to visit in her Airstream. I doubt I'm the only one who's skeptical of quotes from supporters like ''But the strongest thing was that I could tell he is a good man,'' Brooks says gravely. ''And if a good man were president, it would change everything in ways we can't even imagine.'' But more important to me than whether Howard Dean is a good man is whether he's a good organizer - and so far, he's outpaced every one else by a long shot. Reading this piece reminded me of a recent essay in which Sam Smith wrote: Come with me for a moment to the time of when politics was so much a part of New York City that Tammany Hall had to rent Madison Square Gardens for its meetings of committeemen - all 32,000 of them. . In contrast, when the Democratic National Committee decided to send a mailing to its workers some years back, it found that no one had kept a list. The party had come to care only about its donors. We got rid machines like Tammany because we came to believe in something called good government. But in throwing out the machines we also tossed out a culture and an art of politics. It is as though, in seeking to destroy the Mafia, we had determined that family values and personal loyalty were somehow by association criminal as well. ...politics was not something handed down to the people through such intermediaries as Larry King or George Will. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude. So the first non-logical but necessary thing we must do to reclaim democratic politics is to bring it back into our communities, into our hearts to bring it back home. True politics, in imitation of baseball, the great American metaphor, is also about going home. Yet like so much in our national life, we are only going through the motions, paying ritualistic obeisance to a faith we no longer follow. In fact, we have lost our way home. We must not only make politics a part of our culture but make our culture a part of our politics. I share much of Sam Smith's - and others' - skepticism both about what Dean's record portends for working people and about the depth of his commitment to a new new American politics that would include much of the strengths of the old one. But at least he's a good enough organizer, and an innovative enough politician, to merit incredulous, confused pieces in the New York Times Magazine.

Want to see the problem with the mainstream media (including the supposed luminary of the liberal media)? This was on the front page of today's Times. This was buried inside of it.