Back in Chicago, Obama laments lack of "a father who was around"

President Barack Obama acknowledged on Friday that he wished his father had been a bigger part of his life as he argued that stronger families are just as important as gun control in reducing crime and violence in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

Obama returned to his old home neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago with a different take on his gun control message - that it will require an improved home environment for children to reduce the possibility that they will one day resort to violence.

To do that, he said, will require better economic conditions for low- and middle-class Americans, one reason he wants to raise the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $9, a proposal he offered in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, was raised largely by his mother and grandparents in Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama Sr., divorced Obama's mother when the president was two years old, and he was the central figure in Obama's memoir, "Dreams from My Father."

Pointing to a group of at-risk teenage boys with whom he had met privately before delivering a speech, Obama said he had not been much different than them.

"Don't get me wrong," he said in the address to high school students at Hyde Park Academy. "As the son of a single mom, who gave everything she had to raise me with the help of my grandparents, I turned out okay."

"But at the same time, I wish I'd have had a father who was around and involved," he told the mainly black audience.

Obama worked as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago but had a more privileged background than many of the children he addressed on Friday.

While I agree with you on a general level, Citizen, I think you “generalize” too far, and then try to apply it individually. Just a bit wrong-headed, in my not so humble opinion, and you are missing the mark.

We all have an obligation to get over whatever crap happened to us when we were kids. God gave us brains for a reason. Barry Dunham had many more opportunities than others born in very similar circumstances, and they didn’t become liars, socialists, and deceivers.

Let us call him by his honestly earned original name, and cut the sob psychobabble nonsense.

Barry Dunham, he is. We have no idea who his father is, and it certainly wasn’t the idiot senior Obama, who was an abusive drunkard, and only saw him once in his life (if I remember right).

President Dunham has a certain ring, doesn’t it? Might remind him, if used publicly, that he may have fooled some of the people, but not all of the people, etc.

No matter how lousy his childhood, there is no excuse for his disrespect for the Constitution and the Presidency, his arrogant and egotistical assumptions of power, or his attempt to over-ride the powers given to the congress, flawed as that institution might be .

Many people all over the world have suffered worse than “poor little barry”, but have grown up, overcome bitterness and “poor-me” excuses, and have grown into honorable and trustworthy neighbors and citizens.

And, just do you know - there are many loving, committed, and moral parents who provided a proper Christian upbringing to their children, who then ended up rebelling, making wrong choices, and breaking their parents’ hearts.

Free will, and all that. Do not make excuses for an adult individual’s wrong choices in life.

Barry Dunham had many opportunities given to him, but failed to make the grade. It is his fault alone.

It is also the fault of the “illiterati” among us that he was elected in the first place. We have lost our republic to the greedy, who will vote for anyone promising to redistribute our hard earned dollars, and little Barry Dunham is just another little hitler wanna-be.

Time will tell whether he pulls it off. Given the present state of our brain-dead press, I wouldn’t want to place a bet against him.

Please don’t misunderstand my point. I wasn’t speaking of political ideologies so much as expressing sadness that there is so much evil in this world. The way I see it, President Obama is hopelessly misguided. He probably thinks he’s doing good, but his ideology always ends in ruin and despair on both individual and cultural levels.

In regards to his upbringing, you’re absolutely right. Some people come out of really dysfunctional families to become truly great people. Others are raised right, like you wrote, but rebel. However, the odds are greatly stacked against someone like Barry Dunham. They really are, and his policies are going to help create even more Barry Dunhams.

That saddens me.

This is the one area where Barack Obama might make a truly good contribution to society.

I put that in the present/future tense because since he most unfortunately was re-elected he still has a chance to do it.

Of course it would have been better if he’d actually tried to do something in this area during his first term, but leave that aside.

Obama DOES know what it is like to not have a dad, and he HAS done a good job getting and staying married and looking after his own children.

Almost all the “gun violence” in our nation aside from the acts of truly crazy people and private issues (neither of which will even be prevented) stems from essentially fatherless minority youths gunning each other (and random bystanders) down.

Obama could, uniquely, encourage a better way to be for the black (and hispanic) community. Of course, he could probably work on this all day, every day, and still not have 100% success. And perhaps he is afraid that, were he to do this, the race-hucksters would turn against him, like they turned against Bill Cosby when he tried to wake black people up.

But still, he should try. He’s got 4 more years (MEGA SIGH), maybe he can still do one more thing (aside from killing OBL) that is good.

He does look like Marshall in that pic, but I really do not think Marshall is his biological father. When I saw Dinesh D’Sousa’s (sp?) movie last year, seeing Obummer’s half-brother in Kenya being interviewed convinced me that Obama, Sr., was the real father.

I had not been thinking of the paternity issue; it just struck me as I watched the Kenyan brother. The brother just looked too much like the current infestation in the White House for me to think that Obummer’s father could be anyone else.

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