I've already mentioned the Ron Paul Newsletter and the racist remarks that appeared there. At the time, Paul was not serving in Congress, he had turned his back on politics and was busy delivering babies. I think it's reasonable to assume that he didn't have much interest in monitoring his newsletter at the time... and if the NAACP says he's not a racist, then I'm inclined to believe it.

I think the real issue many people have with this is not whether or not Ron Paul is a racist himself. The issue is more subtle: He's traditionally had the support of various racist organizations, like Stormfront. Therefore, whether or not he actually shared their opinion or not, it would be beneficial to him to appear to be racist, and thus he might have tacitly approved of the publication of those texts.

That would be pretty unprincipled and telling of self-serving, and when you're dealing with a libertarian, selfishness isn't exactly uncommon, so therefore it is unsettling.

The fact that he just brushed this off without really addressing it, or giving any explanation for how those texts got published in the first place - all we have is second-guessing like "he was too busy to keep up with his own paper" - the whole thing just smells very fishy.

Basically, it may be nothing, but he certainly hasn't done a good job of demonstrating this, and that in itself makes it worse.