Flashback: Zell Miller on Joe Biden and acceptance

For months I've been mocking the Barack Obama campaign as the Cult of Change. To me Obama's "change" is warmed-over failed liberal dogma from the 1960s. But after Obama's pick of the full-of-himself Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate, it's hard even for Obama-nuts to argue that Biden's selection represents "change."

Joe Biden is definitely part of the mess in Washington, as other have written today.

But I want to go back five years to Zell Miller's book, A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat.

Miller was then winding down his stint as a Democratic senator from Georgia. Prior to that, he was the Peach State's governor and lieutenant governor. The man from tiny Young Harris was the keynote speaker at the 2004 Republican National Convention. He remains a Democrat, albeit one estranged from the party.

Here's what Miller wrote about Biden:

"Not long after I arrived in the Senate, I was sitting at my beautiful old mahogany desk in the Senate chamber, a desk by the way that has the names Russell, Talmadge, and Nunn carved in it. I was sitting there, probably frowning, when Senator Joe Biden of Delaware spotted me. He's been in the Senate thirty years, and he came over and sat down and said, "I've watched a lot of you former governors come up here and invariably you go through three phases (like a person grieving over a death, I suppose)."

"The first phase is disbelief. You just can't believe how legislation and decisions are made." He was right. I arrived in the Senate in the middle of the appropriations process and I could not believe the feeding frenzy.

"The next phase," he said, "is anger. You stay mad most of the time, and you want to change the system and make it more orderly."

And then, finally, he said the third phase is "acceptance." I have not reached that step. Not even close. I am still angry because of the petty partisanship on both sides of the aisle. Angry that one single senator representing less than one fifth of 1 percent of the American people can stop any president of the United States--even during wartime--from making a crucial appointment to his own team.

Clearly Biden reached the "acceptance phase" many years ago. He's not change anyone can believe in.

John McCain, the man who some say has a temper problem, like Miller, never reached the acceptance phase.

We need more angry people in Washington.

Biden is part of the problem. A big part.

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