As I write, this report hasn’t been confirmed yet but if Hillary Clinton is going to be Barack Obama’s secretary of state, doesn’t that discredit a major argument in favor of the change agent’s presidential candidacy? During the primaries, and to a lesser extent during the general election, Obama argued that his lack of foreign-policy experience didn’t matter because he showed better judgment on these issues than the foreign-policy establishment of both parties. The main evidence he showed superior judgment was his early opposition to the Iraq war. In fact, if Obama had not opposed the war from the beginning he would have been much less likely to win the Democratic nomination.

It was the equivalent of Ross Perot’s rejoinder that he didn’t have any experience running up a $4 trillion national debt. Barack Obama didn’t have experience leading or voting the country into a $1 trillion war. Obviously, this line of argument wasn’t persuasive to Joe Lieberman but it was in line with most rank-and-file Democrats’ thinking — and that of many independents as well.

So who does Obama turn to when he starts hiring people for major positions in his administration? Joe Biden for vice president, even though Biden voted to authorize the Iraq war. Rahm Emanuel for White House chief of staff, even though Emanuel supported the war and says he would have voted for it even if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. And now Hillary Clinton for secretary of state, even though she famously voted for the Iraq war.

Obama now seems to owe Biden and especially Clinton an apology, given that he used their war votes and his early antiwar speech against them to great effect. If Hillary had voted against the Iraq war, it is difficult to see how Obama could have beaten her in the Democratic primaries without taking stands that would have doomed him in the general election. In fact, it’s hard to see how he would have beaten her at all.

Again, if this report is confirmed, it will be interesting to see how antiwar activists react to this. Are they antiwar or just anti-Republican?