I’m slowly los­ing inter­est­ing in the U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion now that the result seems inevitable (get on with the inau­gu­ra­tion already). How­ever, the Obama–McCain dance-off video (via Kot­tke) com­bined with a fea­ture in the lat­est The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive, has tem­porar­ily piqued my inter­est again.

In said fea­ture, The Right Choice?, 18 promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tives were asked to dis­cuss “how they are vot­ing, whether they see their vote as advanc­ing a par­tic­u­lar issue or fit­ting into a larger strat­egy, and what con­flicts their choice might entail”. This from Fran­cis Fukuyama:

Amer­ica has been liv­ing in a dream world for the past few years, los­ing its basic val­ues of thrift and pru­dence and liv­ing far beyond its means, even as it has lec­tured the rest of the world to fol­low its model. At a time when the U.S. gov­ern­ment has just nation­al­ized a good part of the bank­ing sec­tor, we need to rethink a lot of the Rea­gan­ite ver­i­ties of the past gen­er­a­tion regard­ing taxes and reg­u­la­tion. Impor­tant as they were back in the 1980s and ‘90s, they just won’t cut it for the period we are now enter­ing. Obama is much bet­ter posi­tioned to rein­vent the Amer­i­can model and will cer­tainly present a very dif­fer­ent and more pos­i­tive face of Amer­ica to the rest of the world.

The split between those polled is over­whelm­ingly pro-third party, closely fol­lowed by Obama. McCain brings up the rear, draw­ing level with ‘no vote’.

More Fukuyama? I implore you to read The End of His­tory and the Last Man.