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“If I had a son he would look like Trayvon,” President Obama said Friday of the recent killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, black teenager who was shot last month in Florida by a neighborhood watch volunteer, who has not been charged. “I think [Martin's parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americas are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and we will get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”
In a flash, by answering an unplanned question shouted during an unrelated event, Obama had erased the careful distance from the case that his aides have maintained for days. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to Trayvon Martin’s family,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said on March 19. “But obviously, we’re not going to wade into a local law enforcement matter. I would refer you to the Justice Department and local law enforcement at this point.”

Obama’s press handlers have discouraged the President from getting involved in local issues. It took them weeks to deal with the fallout from his comments on Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates run in with local law enforcement in 2009. In 2010, Obama’s comments supporting the concept of an Islamic Center in lower Manhattan undercut weeks of Democratic messaging on the economy before the 2010 elections.

But on Friday, Obama did it again, deliberately. The Martin case has laid bare racial tensions nationwide. And in speaking out, the President was taking real political risk.

Racial suspicion and bigotry is likely to play at least as big a role in the 2012 election as it did in 2008, when Obama generally tried to avoid any rhetorical or policy actions that could be portrayed by his opponents a favoring one group over another. Obama’s reelection is expected to be a much closer race, and any alienation of working class white voters uncomfortable with the controversy over Martin’s death could hurt him. http://swampland.time.com/2012/03/23/obama-speaks-out-on-trayvon-marti
n-a-personal-appeal-with-political-risk/?iid=sl-main-lede

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