I want to take just a brief moment here this morning to offer a few words of encouragement to any Howard Dean supporters who may have felt their hearts breaking a little bit last night as they watched the governor step onto the stage and found themselves dreaming of what might have been.

In 1984, a little-known senator from Colorado named Gary Hart challenged former vice president Walter Mondale for the Democratic presidential nomination, and, due largely to Mondale's willingness to almost single-handedly destroy the post-Watergate campaign finance laws he'd helped to write, the senator's insurgent campaign of optimism and ideas ended in defeat after a long and sometimes bitter contest. It was a hard lesson in the ways of the world for a generation of starry-eyed young Democrats -- including a seventeen year old kid from South Carolina who, like so many others, had dropped everything to join the New Ideas revolution.

Funny thing, though. That's Gary Hart's Democratic party you're seeing in Boston this week -- unapologetically smart, squarely in the mainstream on national security and foreign policy issues, and willing to think creatively about how best to address this nation's challenges here at home. Sure, Bill Clinton gets the lion's share of the credit for our party's transformation from most folks (as he should, of course; winning matters) but, in truth, that was as much Hart's war he fought and won in the nineties as it was his own, and at least a few of us will always understand and remember that.

So, as the scripture President Clinton quoted in part on Monday night admonishes, be of good cheer, Deaniacs. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a graying and slightly grizzled guy twenty years from now were to find himself sitting down to write a blog post (will we still call them that then?) not unlike the one you're reading now, about a little-known governor from Vermont who lost the contest for his party's nomination, but won the battle for its soul....

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