No, Rick Perry’s not a racist say … Texas Democrats

(By Allahpundit, Hot Air) - Worth posting for two reasons. One: It contains one of the most surreal quotes you’ll ever read in a political story. Two: It helps answer a question I’ve had since WaPo’s story broke on Saturday night. Namely, how’d Perry manage 10 years as governor of Texas without the story about his family’s hunting camp coming out?

The apparent answer: Few people back home seriously believe he’s a racist, including the opposition, so maybe no one thought it mattered.

Even some of Perry’s fiercest Texas critics say they do not believe he is racist. They point to his record of appointments as evidence: He appointed the state’s first African-American state supreme court justice, Wallace Jefferson, and later made him chief justice. (Jefferson’s great grandfather was a slave, “sold like a horse,” Perry once said with disgust.) Perry’s former general counsel and former chief of staff, Brian Newby, is black; so is Albert Hawkins, the former Health and Human Services Commissioner who Perry handpicked to lead the massive agency in 2002.

“He doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” said former Democratic state Rep. Ron Wilson, who is black and served with Perry in his early years in the Legislature. “He didn’t then, and he doesn’t now.”

Added Dallas Democratic Sen. Royce West, who is also black: “I don’t agree with him on policy issues, but you can point to many things he has done that were sensitive to ethnic minorities.”…

“He appointed a black man chief justice of the state Supreme Court, for crying out loud, one of the many high-profile positions he’s given to minorities during his time as governor,” Jason Stanford, a Democratic opposition researcher and author of an upcoming book on Perry, wrote in a weekend blog post. “… If he were an n-bomb dropping cracker, we’d all know.”