Pretty much every source agrees that John McCain really wanted to offer Joe Lieberman his VP nomination, and that Lieberman desperately wanted to accept. But the Southern Conservatives quashed all that, and McCain responded by selecting Sarah Palin, who was not a maverick at all, as far as those same Conservatives were concerned. But even now, we get the occasional bright flash of What Might Have Been.

For instance, over the weekend McCain and Big Joe rolled out a coordinated effort to drop the public option. Just two loveable Centrists, you know, talking about our inability to cover the uninsured at this point in time, even as each calls for a sharp increase in military spending. Look on this lovely photo and weep, Mr. and Mrs. America: you could have had this, with just the tug of a lever.