This is a bit rambling, but if you have any free time and like to be confused by convoluted and not very well thought out ideas than this is the place for you:
It seems a lot of people think one of Dean's contributions / potential contributions is trying to stop the Democratic leadership from giving into to Bush's push to the right (ok the push to the right started with Reagan).
If you want an analogy look at the Republican Party post 1932 and compare it to the Democrats post 1980.
When FDR came in he made some pretty big changes that the Republicans didn't like, he pushed against the power structure the Repubs. had built since the Civil War (only two Democrats held office from 1868 to 1932). The Republicans at first tried to argue against FDR's policies and keep the previous system. This didn't work very well so they than tried to limit the expansion, by adopting parts of it and slowing it down / complaining that it was interfering with Americans' personal liberty, but mostly they kept enough of the ideas to get power (Eisenhower and Nixon). During this period people in the Republican Party tried to wake up Americans and the "sell-out" Republicans that this was unacceptable (Goldwater, Reagan). Then they finally convinced Americans there was a problem with the Governments Social Programs (Reagan) and kept pushing it (Bush I and II).
Now change this to the Democrats in 1980. They have just lost to someone (Reagan) who appears to stand for everything they are against. They spend the next decade trying to run on the same ideas / words that they had used when they were in power (read Mondale and Dukakis), than they decided to try and coop the Republican ideas and just slow them down, while adding a few of their own (read Clinton). If you follow the analogy with the Republicans someone has to shout what's going on here isn't a good idea and go after not just the other party, but also members of its own party who are, in effect, condoning these changes - this is the equivalent of Goldwater. Maybe this is Dean's roll in this analogy. If the analogy holds up Dean would have to win and then get creamed. Personally, I doubt either one will occur, and besides Dean and Goldwater aren't exactly the same (Goldwater was far more ideological than Dean).
This kind of thing can be seen over the history of American politics (on both the small and large scale). A party comes in to power mad at the establishment (see Jackson's starting the Democratic Party, Lincoln's election, FDR's beginning the New Deal, and Reagan's "shining city on a hill"). They took power pushed their ideas, but stopped really thinking about how it was affecting the voters (in their theories everything was going good), meanwhile the opposition party makes token stands and gets elected (often times through luck) periodically (Harrison and Taylor during the Democratic reign from 1828-1860, Cleveland and Wilson from 1860-1932 the civil war years are hard to deal with since the whole country wasn't, Eisenhower and Nixon from 1932-1980...). Than an "insurgent" or crazy "outsider" comes up and wins the election for the other party and the new party goes on with their plan and the cycle continues.
Maybe this is all meaningless, none of these characters are really the same as I the persons I am comparing them to. One of the few things I took from school was if you make a model vague enough you can fit any data into it.
As a note: When I mention grand ideas and "outsiders", I mean these only in terms of the political establishment. Relative to the vast array of ideas and philosophies that have been thought in this country the ideas shown by the people in power have always been much more limited in their scope.