Someone needs to take Timothy Noah back to high school

He doesn't know the first damn thing about reading poetry. As many people predicted, Kerry's brave choice to mock BushCo and use that elitist poetry crap for an inspirational slogan was going to draw out the attacks on Langston Hughes, who is a great figure for the right wing smear machine because he's dead and can't defend himself. Also, he's black and, like many, many people in the 1930's, had Communist alliances.
Anyway, he kicks off with a lie.

The Times notes, in passing, that when Kerry first used the poem (in a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education), he skipped the following "bitter aside on racism":

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Luckily, he provides a link so you can see where Kerry supposedly skipped some lines. And he does. He skips almost all the lines of a rather long poem except four:

O’ let my land be a land where liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

If he had included the next two, the ones that Noah feels that he should have included, Noah would have just chewed on him for skipping other lines in the poem. The thrust of Kerry's speech uses the poem nicely enough. He spends the whole speech pointing out that the rights that have been won since this poem was written in 1938 are under attack. And since this poem is about the continual battle to make America like the promise of America, I don't see the problem.
On top of that larger mistruth, Noah just says something stupid here:

But to call this a "bitter aside" is willfully to misread the poem. Anyone who takes the time to read "Let America Be America Again" will quickly understand that its entire thrust is that nostalgia for a golden age of American freedom is a crock.

But it is an aside, and it's used, along with two other parenthetical asides, to add a note of sarcasm. Of course the aside is the thrust of the whole poem, but to have added those extra two lines in wouldn't have worked with the speech. The sarcastic little comment would have just hung in the air. It works in the poem, of course, because it's followed up by a rousing anger, but again, he wasn't there to read the whole poem, just quote it. The four lines he picked illustrate the America that he and Hughes both want their audience to aim for, and that was the point.
Of course, then Noah takes a really unnecessary slap at Hughes's writing:

"Let America Be America Again," you may have noticed, is not one of Hughes' better efforts. Like a lot of poetry written during the Great Depression, it's didactic and influenced by naive admiration for the Soviet experiment.

My guess is nope, his audience might not actually be as familiar with Hughes's work as Kerry's audience for this speech was.
(See, I'm good at bitter little asides myself.)
Anyway, I wouldn't characterize the poem as didactic so much as angry, sarcastic, and sorrowful in turns, but whatever. If Noah doesn't like having to regard the uglier side of history, he's free to use the word "didactic", but we don't have to believe him. But he's trying to get his audience to think that this poem is about admiration of the Soviet Union and Stalin. That's a stretch, even for parts like this:

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Really now, does someone have to be against fair pay for hard work just to show they aren't a Stalinist? And yes, Hughes, as did many people, had Communist sympathies in the 1930's, but as Lucille Ball pointed out when they tried to blacklist her, back then it was worse to be a Republican.
Of course, jumping all over Langston Hughes is just a strategy to distract readers from the power of his words and is a strategy Noah is eager to discard as soon as he's done with it.

As a slogan, "Let America be America" doesn't improve much when you put Hughes out of your mind and focus on the words themselves. The intended meaning is clear: Let's restore the good things about this country that George W. Bush took away. There's also a hint of nostalgia specifically for the prosperous Clinton era.

Didn't he just criticize Kerry for supposedly using the words out of context? That the poem is referring to an America that never was? In his speech, he makes it clear that he's referring to an America that should be, not an America that was. Noah knows this, he's just muddying the rhetorical waters. He wants it both ways. The phrase means both the America we live in and the America it should be, which he seems to grasp but still he thinks it doesn't make sense.

But there's something pompous and snotty about the way they're expressed. (That's why Hughes chose these particular words to lampoon idealization of America's past.) America may be badly governed at the moment, but it's still America. The slogan "Let America be America again" is like HBO's annoying slogan, "It's not TV. It's HBO." As Larry David grumpily retorts on (HBO's) Curb Your Enthusiasm, "It's not TV? It's TV. What do they think people are watching?"
Ten years ago, liberals justifiably hit the roof when the rabidly Republican Rep. Dick Armey, addressing Democrats on the House floor, said, "Your president is just not that important to us." He's your president, too, they answered. How does Armey's rude distancing differ from saying that Bush's America isn't really America?

In one case, he was directly challenging the authority of the President, who was elected by the popular vote, unlike the one we have now who liberals still manage to accept is President, however unjustly.
But the two phrases have nothing in common. Armey was rejecting a President because he didn't like his politics and was being a snothead. It certainly wasn't a poetic concept, but more like one parent telling another, "Your child is acting up again."
In this case, it's a gen-you-eye-ne poetic metaphor thingy. The phrase means, let America, as in the name of the country we live in, be America, as in the idealistic America that should be, the one where we are free and striving for the common good, again. And Noah's attempts to twist that into an elitist statement are feeble at best.
Sorry for the length of this rant, but this particular editorial really teed me off.