President Delivers Exhortation to Fathers

President Delivers Exhortation to Fathers
By HELENE COOPER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: June 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/us/politics/20obama.html?_r=1&th&emc=th


WASHINGTON — President Obama donned his father-in-chief hat on Friday, devoting much of his afternoon to emphasizing the importance of mentors and father figures for young people and to prodding young men to be better parents.

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Students at the White House event. One asked whether being a father or president was more fun.

“When fathers are absent, when they abandon their responsibility to their children, we know the damage that does to our families,” Mr. Obama told teenagers and community leaders in the East Room of the White House, beginning what he called a “national conversation on responsible fatherhood and healthy families.”

Mr. Obama sprinkled his talk with references to his own absent father, who left him with his mother in Hawaii when he was 2 and visited him only once after that.

“I say this as someone who grew up without a father in my life,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s something that leaves a hole in a child’s heart that governments can’t fill.”

He said children raised without fathers were more likely to drop out of school and abuse drugs. But aware of his own example, he told his audience — a diverse group that included Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC and the skateboarder Tony Hawk — that growing up fatherless did not mean a person could not succeed.

That Mr. Obama was giving such attention to the issue at a time of crisis in Iran and high-stakes debate on health care and financial overhauls shows how personally he takes fatherhood, White House officials said.

In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama describes his father, who died when Mr. Obama was 21, as “a myth to me, both more and less than a man.” As a father himself now, Mr. Obama talked on Friday about raising his two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

During the question-and-answer part of the event, one student, who introduced himself as Larry Holmes from St. Albans School, asked Mr. Obama: “Traveling from state to state, country to country, being the president, which one is funner? Being a father or being a president?”

“There’s nothing more fun than being a father,” Mr. Obama said, then quipped, “Now, my kids aren’t teenagers yet, so I don’t know whether that will maintain itself.”

He told the audience that one of the best moments he has had since becoming president was going to a parent-teacher conference at Sidwell Friends School, “where the teachers were bragging on my children.”

Mr. Obama’s remarks were not as tough on black fathers as they have been in the past. Last Father’s Day at one of the largest black churches in Chicago, he delivered a sharp message to black men, saying, “We need fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn’t just end at conception.”

That address was striking for its bluntness. On Friday, his words were more measured, but he still called for personal responsibility and repeated the “conception” line, to applause.

Mr. Obama also provided a glimpse of his feelings about his daughters. Another student asked him how he felt when he became a father.

“Malia was born on the Fourth of July,” he said, adding that his wife, Michelle, woke him at 3 a.m. to tell him she was about to have the baby. He described jumping out of bed and looking for the hospital bag, and, after Malia was born, driving home “really slow” from the hospital. He told of the wonder of suddenly being aware that “there was a new life in your house,” and of how he checked on the baby “every five minutes” to know that she was still breathing.

After the session Friday, Mr. Obama’s guests headed to the South Lawn for barbecue cooked by the celebrity chef Bobby Flay and mentoring sessions between youths and local fathers, celebrity fathers and every other type of father. In one mentoring group under a tree, the White House budget director, Peter R. Orszag, sat wearing sunglasses and looking poised to offer mentoring but was seemingly unsure of exactly what to say to the 11 young men assembled before him.

No worry. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. soon appeared. “Orszag!” he yelled, then sat next to him and talked at length with the young men.