RUTHFULLY YOURS

Detroit — The Obama White House has hardly concealed its preference for Mitt Romney as an opponent, given his Northeast base, his suitability as a class-warfare foil, and especially Romneycare. Rick Perry, by contrast, is a Democrat’s worst nightmare — a conservative southerner from hard-scrabble beginnings with a populist touch.

So it’s no surprise that the Democrats’ allies at the Washington Post this weekend ran a story that is the most vile, noxious story since Democrats spoon-fed NPR the Clarence Thomas coke-can fable in 1991.

Never mind that the story is shakily sourced, that it’s about a rock, that it obscures the fact that the Perrys merely leased the land for hunting (giving them hunting rights only — if the Perrys painted over the rock, it would have been an act of disobedience). The Left will stop at nothing to destroy him. Really, the story is itself bigoted, an attempt by an east-coast establishment paper to caricature southerners as racists. (Check the Post’s library — I bet they have a copy of Huckleberry Finn with the N-word in it. And how about their repeated use of the term “Redskins” in their sports section?)

Based on what we already know about Perry, the story’s implication of racism seems unfounded. Perry repeatedly promoted black Texas judge Wallace Jefferson (Texas’s first black supreme-court justice), and he is being hit from the right for his stance on another issue involving people of color (immigration).

Still, this heinous Democratic tactic is getting ample help from the Stupid Party.

“For him to leave [the N-word] there as long as he did before I hear that they finally painted over it is just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country,” GOP candidate Herman Cain told Fox News, picking up the Democrats’ race card.

The rest of the GOP has been pretending that this election is about immigration and making Perry their poster-boy piñata. Meanwhile, in Detroit, unemployment rages at 50 percent and drive-by shootings are a daily occurrence.

The Post’s mainstream-media brethren are already calling N-gate a threat to Perry’s candidacy. Certainly it will be a test of Perry’s forcefulness. (In 1991, Thomas passed the test with his famous “high-tech lynching” comment, which rocked Democrats back on their heels.) But this isn’t about Perry. This is about a mainstream media that is more determined to carry water for Democratic smear campaigns than to inform its readers of the real problems facing this nation.