Perry flap helps Dems paint GOP as racist

The Republican Party is facing a growing perception problem, with a racial epithet in Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s past now the latest in a string of incidents that calls into question where social conservatism ends and intolerance begins.

Perry’s presidential campaign is now engulfed in the controversy surrounding his family’s lease of a hunting camp called “Niggerhead,” a name prominently painted on a rock just outside the Texas property. Perry said his father painted over the name when he leased the property in the early 1980s, but the Washington Post reported neighbors’ claims that the name was still visible in the mid-1990s.