President Obama reacted to the death of Trayvon Martin in deeply personal terms, and his ability to thread the needle on such a highly charged issue won him nearly universal approval — minus two people: Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. The candidates argued that by saying, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” Obama was injecting race into the situation to score political points.
But within days, they were both toning down their language.
“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white kid who had been shot, that would be OK because he wouldn’t look like him?” Gingrich asked Friday on Sean Hannity’s talk radio show. “That’s just nonsense. Dividing this country up — it is a tragedy this young man was shot.”
Santorum sounded a similar note on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” Friday.
“And then, this, it is — again, politicizing it. This is, again, not what the presidents of the United States do. What the president of the United States should do is try to bring people together, not use these types of horrible tragic individual cases to try to drive a wedge in America.”
White House senior adviser David Plouffe called the comments “reprehensible.” Making the rounds on the Sunday shows, Plouffe told CNN’s Candy Crowley “I think those comments were really hard to stomach, really, and I guess trying to appeal to people’s worst instincts.”
Plouffe, for his part, steered clear of the race issue Sunday on “Meet the Press.” “Listen, we have to have the investigation here. I don’t think we want to get ahead of that. I think everybody would be well served to let the investigation continue at both the local level and the federal level, and let that, you know, transpire in the right way, in the appropriate way. And then we’ll see where the facts lead us.”
Even Santorum declined to go quite as far a second time when, on Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” Norah O’Donnell asked him about the appropriateness of Gingrich’s remarks — but he still refused to say race was a factor. “There are a lot of people who have very, very perverted views of reality and obviously have, as we see, people who do horrible things for seemingly senseless reasons,” Santorum said. “And I think it’s hard to generalize from one heinous act something that is, you know, try to make a bigger point out of it. And I think that’s probably what Newt was getting at.”
Gingrich hasn’t exactly backed off his statements that race is not at play, but his campaign issued an endorsement of Gingrich’s take on the Martin case from a black member of his campaign — seemingly acknowledging that his original comments might have offended some people. Kiron Skinner, described in a campaign email as “a senior strategist in the speaker’s presidential campaign” and “an African American scholar” wrote that Gingrich’s “firm commitment to the rule of law, even in the most inflammatory cases, is one more reason why I have endorsed Speaker Gingrich’s presidential campaign.”
Rallies for justice for Martin are still taking place around the country, with more planned this week, including a rally with Martin’s parents in Florida Monday. Martin was killed a month ago Monday.
