We'll agree with the New York Times' nice tribute to Howard Dean in Come Back, Little Deaniacs:

However he fares in the coming primaries, Howard Dean has already touched more than a few young lives. Around the country — campus by campus, computer by computer — thousands of teenagers and 20-somethings have fallen hard for his campaign. They're lucky. It's a wonderful experience to lose one's political heart for the first time, as did the college students who sacrificed long hair and beards to be "clean for Gene" — Eugene McCarthy — in 1968, or the young men who stood bare-chested waving placards for Bill Bradley in the New Hampshire snow or followed the banner of Senator John McCain in 2000. The newly enchanted of 2004 bring a rush of young blood into the nation's old campaign arteries.

....If the product of the Dean movement is thousands of young people who are slightly hardened to the lure of a charismatic candidate, but determined to keep on fighting for a better world, it will have been a success no matter what happens to the former governor of Vermont. That is the way politics, at its best, works. First you discover that your paragon of a candidate is all too deeply human. Then you realize that the real heroics come from you and your friends with the pamphlets, stolidly going door to door.