I'm far from the first to ask this, but ...

During the VP candidate vetting process to select Senator John McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney provided McCain's team with 23 years of his tax returns. And yet the McCain team chose Sarah Palin over Mitt as the 'best' candidate for VP.

Considering the obvious weakness of Palin's resumé relative to the presumed strength of Romney's, just what did McCain's advisers find so troubling about Romney?

One possibility is, of course, Romney's rather moderate record as Governor of Massachusetts. Lord knows he's not touting that record during this year's campaign. Instead, he is playing up his business experience as his major qualifying attribute for the position of President of the United States.

If all you knew about Romney's employment history was what you heard from his campaign advertisements, you'd think that he had been a 'job creator' until he retired from Bain Capital to save the Salt Lake City Olympic games, and you might not even know that he had ever been the Governor of Massachusetts.

This seems odd to me, as one would think that having been the Governor of a state would feature prominently in a candidate's campaign resumé when running for the Presidency of the United States.

But he rarely mentions Massachusetts, and McCain's team found him lacking enough to prefer a whining harpy as a running mate. Since Romney won't publicly release more than one year's tax returns - something his own father, George Romney, dismissed as inadequate - the easiest conclusion to reach is that something troubling is hiding in the 23 years of returns that McCain's team was privy to.