I didn't read the whole wiki article prior quoting in above post. A few items are found further down the entry which are related to some claims I made:

"The Bush campaign and the early Bush Administration did not initially appear to exhibit strong support for neoconservative principles. As a candidate Bush argued for a restrained foreign policy, stating his opposition to the idea of "nation-building"[15] and an early foreign policy confrontation with China was handled without the vociferous confrontation suggested by some neoconservative thinkers."[16]. Also early in the Administration, some neoconservatives criticized Bush's Administration as insufficiently supportive of the State of Israel, and suggested Bush's foreign policies were not substantially different from those of President Clinton.

But Bush's policies seemed to change dramatically immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to columnist Gerard Baker, "It took, improbably, the arrival of George Bush in the White House and September 11, 2001, to catapult [neoconservatism] into the public consciousness. When Mr Bush cited its most simplified tenet — that the US should seek to promote liberal democracy around the world — as a key case for invading Iraq, neoconservatism was suddenly everywhere."

Maybe you call Bush somewhat a centrist wacked really hard by reality- and in that sense similar to a neocon.

And:
Neoconservatives are strong believers in democratic peace theory. Which is:
"Kant foreshadowed the theory in his essay Perpetual Peace written in 1795, although he thought that constitutional republics was only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory

At the above link:
"The democratic peace theory has been extremely divisive among political scientists. It is rooted in the idealist and classical liberalist traditions and is opposed to the previously dominant theory of realism. However, democratic peace theory has come to be more widely accepted and has in some democracies affected policy change.

Presidents of both the major United States parties have expressed support for the theory. Former President Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party: "Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. "
[So that's example of what meant by Clinton to some extent was also influenced by Neocons].

Some dislike the label for various reasons:

"Jonah Goldberg and others have rejected the label as trite and over-used, arguing "There's nothing 'neo' about me: I was never anything other than conservative." Other critics have similarly argued the term has been rendered meaningless through excessive and inconsistent use. For example, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are often identified as leading "neoconservatives" despite the fact that both men have ostensibly been life-long conservative Republicans (though Cheney has been vocally supportive of the ideas of Irving Kristol). Such critics thus largely reject the claim that there is a neoconservative movement separate from traditional American conservatism."

Others:
"...former chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, had the following to say in a December, 2005 interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel: "They are not new conservatives. They're Jacobins. Their predecessor is French Revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre."

Or if I would paraphrase the above: Old fashion hard Lefties- the ones that turned the French revolution into "The Terror". Not a very friendly view of the Neocons.