Post-Dean
I had a professor argue that one measure of The Beatles' greatness/importance was that hardly anyone making music who was popular before them was still popular after them--Frank Sinatra and, to some degree, Elvis Presley the notable exceptions.

Usually I don't buy the argument that losing political candidacies "accomplish" anything. But, I'm starting to re-assess in the case of Howard Dean. I think - and hope, if everything goes right - that we will look back on Democrats in this era and divide them in 2 camps - before Dean and after Dean. There are a whole host of Dem office-holders now that embrace the politics of toughness and contrast on the content side, and bottom-up grassroots organization on the politics side.

Webb, Tester, Schweitzer, Sebelius, Obama to name a few. Democrats who were in office across that divide can likewise be separated into those who either embraced this development (Kennedy, Harkin) or have resisted it (Clinton, Lieberman).

Where I'm going with this is with regard to VP selection. It will be interesting to see if Obama picks a post-Dean figure in the name of consistent vision, or a pre-Dean figure in the name of unity. Hillary is an interesting case in that she is clearly a pre-Dean Democrat, but wound up - quite unintentionally in my view - becoming a post-Dean, movement candidate for President.

Either way, I think it's safe to say that if not for the Dean campaign, many of those new Democrats in federal office would not have won. Also, clearly, Obama would not be the nominee for President now.

Of course, the formula is flawed, oversimplified. If Dean hadn't run the campaign he did, someone else may have used the intertubes to engineer the same kind of political shift. But, he did. In retrospect, his failed campaign did accomplish quite a bit.