Gore's a Dean Man Now

Gore announced his support for Dean on December 9, the third anniversary of the day the Supreme Court halted the final recount.

Those other candidates, and their amen corner in a Washington press corps that still can't quite accept that the Dean insurgency is for real, struggled mightily to come up with a spin that would allow them to dismiss the Gore intervention. But their attempts to reduce his decision to crass calculation missed the fact that Dean and Gore have been talking, and finding common ground, for months.

And Gore, openly critical of advisers who counseled ideological and stylistic caution in 2000, is now closer to Dean on the issues than the talking heads recognize. The former Veep's public criticisms of the war on Iraq, the Patriot Act and the Bush Administration's economic policies match the tone and content of Dean's campaign far more than they do those of Lieberman or Gephardt.