President Obama has generally won high praise for his widely circulated line about the Trayvon Martin shooting—"If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon"—but Newt Gingrich found the comments "disgraceful" and racially divisive. “It’s not a question of who that young man looked like," said Gingrich on Sean Hannity's radio show, according to the National Journal. "Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.
“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him?" asked the former House speaker. "That's just nonsense dividing this country up. ... Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.” Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney also expressed sympathy with and support for Martin's family yesterday, although both avoided attacking Obama with their comments. (More Newt Gingrich stories.)