The Democratic victories November 7 in Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky show the continued preference of majorities for the Democratic party on the issues, even in "red" and "purple" states. These results highlight the fact that Joe Biden's unpopularity is an unnecessary drag on the party and that his candidacy in 2024 is the best chance that Trump has for being re-elected.
Age may be the strongest reason for Biden's unpopularity, but for me the best reason for ditching Biden is his abominable failures in war and foreign policy - above all in Afghanistan, where his arrogance in overruling our military leaders and his unconcern for the lives of tens of thousands of Afghans who loyally served the US government or military led not only to a debacle greater than the US flight from Saigon in 1975, but to the ongoing killing of thousands Afghans whom we left behind.
Although I support the continued arming of Ukraine, I blame Biden for helping to bring about the invasion by pushing NATO expansion over the preceding 30 years as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later as vice-president, for refusing to negotiate with Putin in the months before the invasion, and for discouraging Zelensky from continuing negotiations begun in Turkey just after the invasion.
Now, Biden is failing to apply pressure
on the Netanyahu government to end the slaughter of Palestinian
civilians and to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Even before the
Hamas terrorist attack on October 7 the US ought to have stopped
supporting an Israeli government composed of avowed terrorists who
already were intensifying ethnic cleansing actions in the West Bank.
The obsession of that government with its operations in the West Bank led
to neglect by the IDF of security on the border with Gaza and to the success of the Hamas attacks.
For the moment I am supporting Dean
Phillips as the only credible alternative to Biden, but I hope others
will follow his lead and declare. In the 2020 primary I voted for
Bernie Sanders, but he is even older than Biden, so now I hope that
Elizabeth Warren, now a sprightly 74-year-old, will declare her
candidacy for the nomination, following Dean Phillips. The person who
I think would be the strongest of all possible candidates, however,
is Congressman Ro Khanna, 47-year-old Indian-American born in
Philadelphia. He has often been interviewed on television channels
from Fox News to Democracy Now and he makes more sense than almost
any other Democratic politician. He has a charm comparable to Obama's but probably a deeper understanding of the issues than Obama ever had.
