neocons have become. So that's not too surprising since John McSame wants to keep the neocon movement going.

Awesomeness. McCain's chief something or other left because he was facing Obama.

denounce and reject.

Or tremendously short-sighted.  He may have renounced neoconservatism after seeing its effects as implemented by President Bush, but he should have seen (as many of us on the left saw) that the desperate position we are in today was always going to be an inevitable consequence of the neoconservative world-view.

Either he was unable to look far enough forward to predict the disastrous effects of his own poisonous ideology, or he simply sees the way the wind is blowing and is renouncing neoconservatism now only because it is no longer popular.

Fukuyama (and Bill Kristol and all the other right-wing apologists) will get my forgiveness and respect the day they pronounce to the world, "we were wrong, our judgment was fatally flawed, and we recognize we can never again be trusted as commentators or rational thinkers in the realm of politics.  We're becoming farmers."

But Obama can't really control who endorses him.  So oh well.  Even a broken watch is right twice a day, and this must be one of Fukuyama's accidental right-nesses.

I think the reason for Fukuyama's endorsement is pretty simple. He knows that we cannot rely mostly on hard power and succeed, so he cannot support McCain, but he prefers Obama's American Exceptionalism to Clinton's liberal multilateralism.  Shaun Appleby examined Obama's American Exceptionalist approach here last year, it is mostly aligned with neoconservative principles. Even rhetorically Fukuyama's end of history is aligned with Obama's transformational post-partisanship, and, of course, Fukuyama, Obama and neoconservatism grew out of the intellectual cradle of the University of Chicago.

Neocons endorsing Democrats, silly you are for being joyful about this. It's actually quite gross.

A little history:

Along with Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Fukuyama was one of just two dozen PNAC charter members. He also signed a 1998 PNAC letter to then-President Bill Clinton urging him to "undertake military action" aimed at "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power."

Indeed, as late as Sept. 20, 2001, nine days after 9/11, he signed another PNAC letter to Bush that also called for Hussein's ouster "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack." Anything less, the letter argued, "will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

Despite those hawkish antecedents, Fukuyama had second thoughts even before the Iraq invasion, particularly about the democratic messianism and unilateralism with which the "war on terror" was being conducted.

In a December 2002 Wall Street Journal article, he warned that "the idealist project" of transforming the region may "come to look more like empire pure and simple" and that "it is not at all clear that the American public understand that it is getting into an imperial project as opposed to a brief in-and-out intervention in Iraq."

But by late 2004, he was writing that anyone - particularly neoconservatives - who believed that the situation in Iraq would become sufficiently stable after elections in early 2005 for U.S. troops to begin withdrawing was "living in fantasyland."

And one year later, Fukuyama was already warning that failures in Iraq were paving the way for a return to U.S. isolationism. He believed that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, coupled with Washington's failure to marshal international support for its efforts in Iraq and its incompetence in stabilizing the country, had largely destroyed its credibility as a "benevolent hegemon" to which the world, Kristol and Kagan confidently predicted, would willingly, if not eagerly, defer.

Fukuyama's latest article, "After Neoconservatism," is essentially an elaboration of these ideas in a more comprehensive form, as well as a plea for a more modest and classically "conservative" foreign policy that, without abandoning "the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights," will also be conducted "without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about."

I don't know if the diarist is genuinely surprised to see Fukuyama supporting a Democrat or if it's a bit of poetic license.  I think it would be funny to watch how the exact same people would react if Fukuyama had revealed that he supports Hillary.

"If John McCain has lost Francis Fukuyama, who's next?  Richard Perle?  Richard Cheney?  
Change is coming.  And not a moment too soon."

No thanks, really.  I'd rather keep them in the Republican Party (a.k.a. the party of "ideas") as far away from my party as possible.

So that later on the Repubs can point to his presidency as a failure.

They are afraid of Clinton getting in, because she can HANDLE the issues and will do a great job because she knows what she is doing. It would take away their talking point for the future, and she would actually get things like universal health care going, which would brand the Dems as good for working people for generations, as Social Security has.

Obama will NOT bring in universal health care. In fact, with his plan we will have more of the same for many more years, killing 20,000 and more every year from lack of basic health care.

i wouldn't say that fukiyama has seen the light; but rather he has seen the most incompetent administration in american history bumbling the prosecution of his ideal and has to distance himself from them to try to cling to any semblance of credability whatsoever.

It's great to see a substantive political discussion on MyDD that focuses  on ideas instead of petty insults.  Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread.