This seems guaranteed to annoy a lot of the right people for the wrong reasons:

Obama is hoping to appoint cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee.

Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain’s closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defence secretary.

If he did end up winning, putting Hagel in his Cabinet wouldn’t really put my mind at ease, but then I have been an unusually harsh critic of Sen. Hagel’s claim to being “an opponent of the Iraq war” and of his foreign policy views more generally, but I can see how it would reassure a lot of people that we would have someone reasonably competent at the Pentagon (plus Lugar at State?) under Obama.  While this may be consistent with his “unity” theme, I don’t see how it helps consolidate his support among the party regulars, and I expect a new round of complaints in the netroots to be coming soon.  It would certainly be something if a victorious Obama gave both Defense and State appointments to more or less “realist” Republicans–can you imagine the backlash from both parties?  So much for “change you can believe in”!  The funny thing is that a Hagel selection would inevitably draw more scorn from all those Republicans who decided that Hagel was persona non grata for expressing some skepticism about the war early last year.  It would still probably annoy a lot of partisans who wanted the post for one of their own, and instead of being a reassuring sign of bipartisan governance it would be received as confirmation in the eyes of his mainstream critics that Hagel is just a RINO and that Obama associates with “appeasers,” which is strangely how many Republicans see Hagel.  Update: On cue, Ledeen takes this line more or less exactly

For my part, I wouldn’t find it reassuring at all, since the last time we had a Defense Secretary from the other party in a Democratic administration we had the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (another war Hagel supported), and Hagel is almost as much of an interventionist as Obama.  One thing that should give everyone pause is that it’s entirely conceivable that Hagel could serve readily enough in a McCain administration, too.