The Democrats are winning on the issues, but nomination of Biden would be Trump's best chance for being re-elected. Biden must go. On war and foreign policy his failures have been abominable. I support Dean Phillips but hope to see Elizabeth Warren and Ro Khanna run for president.

::::::::

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.

Authors Website: https://loichpatli.wordpress.com/

Authors Bio:

Andy Silver, MA, MSPH, is a retired unAmerican epidemiologist. In 1965, horrified by reports of American atrocities in Vietnam and the overwhelming public support for them, he decided that he was living under enemy occupation and that revolution was necessary. First, he volunteered to work with SNCC in Clay County, Mississippi on voter registration and a school boycott. Then he entered law school at the University of Washington, where he became president of SDS. In 1966 he was drafted after writing a letter to his Nashville, Tennessee draft board condemning the war of aggression in Vietnam. Not being arrested immediately after refusing conscription in Seattle, he took a bus to Vancouver, BC. Mr. Silver eventually arrived in Israel, where he became a citizen, attended the Hebrew University, and served in the IDF. After 13 years he left Israel as a matter of conscience, refusing to be part of an apartheid system. He found a cheap flight to Bangkok, and then settled in Chiangmai, Thailand. In 1989, he brought his wife and three children to Chapel Hill, NC. He did not wish to leave Chiangmai, but it was necessary to bring the family either to the US or to Israel for the children to receive education beyond the sixth grade. Finding that a minimum wage no longer was a living wage, as it had been in the sixties, he entered graduate study at the University of North Carolina, where he was able to obtain student loans. He graduated with an MSPH in epidemiology at the age of 55, then worked ten years with a quality improvement organization in North Carolina. In 2010 he returned to Thailand, where he worked voluntarily 8 years with the Karen Department of Health and Welfare, initiating a quality improvement program in mobile health clinics inside occupied Burma. The clinics are staffed by refugees trained by volunteer oversees health professionals in refugee camps.