Obama: "If I Get Punched, Very Rarely Have You Seen Me Not Hit Back Hard"
Late last Thursday afternoon, before announcing who will join him in the fall campaign against John McCain, Barack Obama spoke with NEWSWEEK's Jon Meacham about fathers and sons, character and ambition--and how he will not hesitate to fight hard in the remaining weeks of the race. Edited excerpts:
MEACHAM: You and Senator McCain fit into very interesting categories of presidential history. There is either a really strong father in the picture--Adams, Kennedy, Bush--or there is virtually none at all--Jackson, Hayes, Clinton. Why do you think men with strong mothers and absent fathers tend to do so well in politics?
OBAMA: It's an interesting question, and I've always got to be careful about pop psychology. [But] I offered one suggestion in something I wrote in "The Audacity of Hope," and this is not original to me: "A man's either trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes." I think to put yourself through what is a pretty rigorous process of running for president, you've got to have learned to set up some pretty high expectations for yourself--something's got to be driving you--and in my case if you have somebody that is absent, maybe you feel like you've got something to prove when you're young, and that pattern sets itself up over time. But also because, again in my case, the stories I heard about my father painted him as larger than life, which also meant that I felt I had something to live up to. You could argue that if you're too well adjusted, you don't end up running for president. So if the pattern sets in pretty early on where you're pushing your comfort level, it probably has to do with those very early influences, and that can come from either the absence or the presence of a father who ends up motivating you in some way.
Newsweek | Jon Meacham | August 24, 2008 09:55 AM