That’s why presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., recently said that America needed to support democracy and pressure Gen. Pervez Musharraf to restore elections in Pakistan.

Few Democrats or Republicans would disagree with his idealistic rhetoric. Although Obama wouldn’t express the same support for the struggling Iraqi democracy, he sort of sounded like a softer neocon — more worried about the lack of freedom in Pakistan than the fact we might undermine a strongman with nukes and a restive population.

Take also Iran. Both parties worry about an Iran with a nuclear bomb; neither one has sure ideas how to stop it. The Republicans seem to want to talk tough without bombing the mullahs; the Democrats prefer just to talk with them.

Either way, they agree we don’t have much leverage to stop the theocracy other than stabilizing nearby democratic Iraq, encouraging dissidents, imposing sanctions and surrounding Iran with a bloc of worried Arab states.

A year from now, neither George Bush nor a quieter Iraq will inflame Democrats. And without these familiar bogeymen, they will to have to state what they are for, rather than what they are against.

If Democrats keep Congress and win the presidency, they probably won’t do things much differently in Afghanistan. America’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also won’t change much. And if the next president is a Republican, it’s a safe bet he won’t invade any new countries.

As the Democrats move closer to the controversial neoconservative position of actively supporting democratic reform in the Middle East, they will claim that their strong idealistic diplomacy is the proper corrective to the Bush administration’s unilateral misadventures.

The Republicans will counter that with Saddam gone and the Taliban out of power, constitutional governments in their places, and both countries slowly stabilizing, the necessary unpleasant work is mostly done. So using military force to topple terrorist-sponsoring autocrats, at least for now, no longer has to be a ready option.

But either way, both will sound awfully similar — sort of like soft neocons.