In Response to: New Releases

You and your contributors to your new volume are taking advantage of the fact that every bad president makes the previous one look good. Barack Obama was a disaster for this country. His rise to power is responsible, along with George W. Bush, for the understandable backlash which elected Trump. But just because Trump is about as awful as anyone can be in the Oval, don't make a hero out of Obama, an ambitious man who used race unscrupulously to get elected by his own people and by guilt-ridden white people. His foreign policy was hardly better than Trump's, so far as we can see at this point, and his relations with Congress, pace Republican arrogance, were equally ineffective. Please write about Obama without Trump in your rear-view mirror, or you will crash.

Norman Ravitch *62
Savannah, Ga.