Is it wrong...

...that I put down this Times story after reading this lede:

President-elect Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination with the enthusiastic support of the left wing of his party, fueled by his vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq and by one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate.

Now, his reported selections for two of the major positions in his cabinet -- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Timothy F. Geithner as secretary of the Treasury -- suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.

OK, I went and read it after I decided to post. Am I the only one not surprised that, in the midst of economic calamity and two wars, Obama's going with some experienced hands? I feel like I keep reading this  "Newsflash: Barack Obama isn't a leftie" story since the primaries. I never thought he was really to the left of Hillary Clinton. He just happened to be anti-war. That isn't the same thing.

UPDATE: Another one:

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama boasted of opposing the Iraq War from the start.

But as president-elect, he has come to the rescue of surge supporter Joe Lieberman and flirted with the idea of keeping on Bush administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates -- and now he seems poised to nominate war-authorizing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to serve as his secretary of state.

How are the things after the "but" in opposition to what precedes it? Buchanan opposed the Iraq War. Hitchens supported it, but thinks Hillary would be awful. The thing that's bugging me is Obama's early nominations had swung hard left, whatever that would be, there'd be a ton of stories with headlines like "Obama abandons bipartisanship" and ledes like "He ran on change and bipartisanship, but President-Elect Obama has veered sharply to the left..."