According to Jonathan Clarke, in an article appearing on the BBC’s website yesterday, the big loser in the 2008 election was neoconservatism. After finding friends in the Bush White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney himself, Clarke asserts, neoconservatism’s allies have been voted out of Washington by the American electorate who now favor the realism on which President-Elect Barack Obama campaigned.

It would be presumptuous to access the staying power of neoconservatism among the American electorate at this time, but there is little question that since winning the election last November, the President-Elect has begun to see at least some of the wisdom in neoconservative thought.

Only yesterday, as Abe  noted on this blog, Vice-President Elect Joe Biden affirmed a continuation of Bush’s strategy in Iraq for at least the next three years. And, a major campaign talking point, and one that continues to dominate Obama’s foreign policy plan, is the commitment of more American troops to fight in Afghanistan.

Clarke notes that, “the epitaph of neoconservatism has been written before – prematurely, as it turned out, in the 1980s.”

Indeed. Hours after the article’s publication, President-Elect Barack Obama himself went some way toward shelving this most recent obituary by dining with several of America’s leading neoconservatives. The ideas of  Bill Kristol, David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer clearly carry enough weight to warrant a personal powwow with the President-elect.

Obama is not a neoconservative (nor was President George W. Bush or Vice-President Cheney, for that matter), but the apparent incorporation of neoconservative thought into his foreign policy prescriptions leaves Clarke’s thesis looking a little worse for the wear.