Look to past for most ‘openly racist’ president

No, Jack McWherter (Letters, July 3), the Obama administration was not the “most openly racist” of your lifetime. That “honor” probably goes to Richard Nixon, who employed the infamous “southern strategy” whereby southern whites were lured to switch parties by appealing to their racism. As Nixon’s political strategist put it, “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe Whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

But a close second in the racism race has to go to our current president, who championed the Obama “birther” lie, who referred to Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists, who instituted a travel ban against an entire religion, who referred to “s-hole” countries, who said a Hispanic judge could not be objective, who refers to white supremacists as “very good people,” and whose cabinet is more white and more male than any president since Ronald Reagan (who, incidentally, called Africans “monkeys”).

And no, Anthony Watts (Letters, July 4), the District of Columbia statehood effort is not the clearest “example of lust for power and disdain for (our) founding principles.” The founders would certainly be sympathetic to their cause of “no taxation without representation.” Mitch McConnell’s theft of Obama’s Supreme Court pick and refusal to conduct a legitimate impeachment trial were much more egregious.

— Scott Paulo, Chico