How is it that Obama's 'liberals' are far less interested in democracy and pluralism around the world than Bushes' conservatives?

I think it is part and parcel with the flight from exceptionalism.  The left does not believe that the US is unique or even particularly noteworthy - after all there are many more 'progressive' countries.  In their view politics is about power, not principle and therefore each situation has it's own circumstances.  To the leftist, when it comes to politics, there is no morally right side, just your side or the powerful side.  This is what happens when you abandon transcendent faith for the latest scientific nostrum - you become and organism, with no moral center - just lusts.  And shorn of your humanity, you stop recognizing it in others.

The Obama Administration has ignored the desires of people for liberty:  Elliott Abrams

U.S. officials talked to Mubarak plenty in 2009 and 2010, and even talked to the far more repressive President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, but they talked about their goals for Israeli-Palestinian peace and ignored the police states outside the doors of those presidential palaces. When the Iranian regime stole the June 2009 elections and people went to the streets, the Obama administration feared that speaking out in their support might jeopardize the nuclear negotiations. The “reset” sought with Russia has been with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, not the Russian people suffering his increasingly despotic and lawless rule.

This has been the greatest failure of policy and imagination in the administration’s approach: Looking at the world map, it sees states and their rulers, but has forgotten the millions of people suffering under and beginning to rebel against those rulers. “Engagement” has not been the problem, but rather the administration’s insistence on engaging with regimes rather than with the people trying to survive under them.

Hat tip Contentions.