Now that Dean has left the race and the Democratic nominee will either be Kerry or Edwards (probably Kerry), the temptation will be great to just forget about Dean's movement. Democrats who, six weeks ago, took Dean very seriously indeed now appear prepared to deny under oath that they ever did any such thing.

That would be a mistake. As a number of observers have pointed out, the fact that Dean couldn't secure the nomination doesn't mean the process of transformation he started within the Democratic party isn't needed. For a useful sampling of opinion along these lines, see the mini-symposium on Dean on the American Prospect website, with contributions by Michael Tomasky, Simon Rosenberg, Garance Franke-Ruta and Nicholas Confessore and the article in Salon.com by Joan Walsh.

A lot of these authors make the same couple of points in different ways. Here's the short course.

1. Dean did not make a real ideological or policy contribution to the party (though his willingness to stand up to Bush played a critical role in reviving the Democrats' fighting spirit). Confessore well-summarizes Dean's lack of ideological distinctiveness:

He put forward the least radical health-care proposal of any of the five major candidates running before New Hampshire. His ideas to expand federal aid for child care and college tuition were not much more than Clinton retreads. His best-known proposal -- repealing even the middle-class tax cuts passed by Congress in 2001 and 2002 -- was notably only for its stupidity, and he likely would have dropped it had he stayed in the race.

2. Dean's real contribution lay in the process by which his campaign operated, especially via the internet: recruiting enthusiastic volunteers; raising huge sums of money from small donors; and generating a "movement" level of energy at the grassroots of Democratic party. By doing so, he showed the party what it was missing and how hollow Democratic party organization had become.

Therefore, if the party is to maximize its chance of winning in 2004 and, especially, build an effective majority party for the future, it will have to internalize and further develop the organizing methods of the Dean campaign. In a sense, Deanism is now a "third force" in the Democratic party, not clearly tied to either the traditional liberals or the orthodox New Democrats of the DLC. Harnessing that third force is key to the Democrats' future; neither liberals nor New Democrats should delude themselves that things can now go back to the way they were. And, for that matter, neither should John Kerry--he will need the third force's help and plenty of it to beat George Bush.