Obama has the right approach to fatherhood

Reasons to agree:

1. “How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child? How many times have our hearts stopped in the middle of the night with the sound of a gunshot or a siren? How many teenagers have we seen hanging around on street corners when they should be sitting in a classroom? How many are sitting in prison when they should be working, or at least looking for a job? How many in this generation are we willing to lose to poverty or violence or addiction? How many?” “Yes, we need more cops on the street. Yes, we need fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. Yes, we need more money for our schools. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities.” “But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child--it’s the courage to raise one.” Barack Obama, Chicago church speech, in Change We Can Believe In, p.235 Jun 15, 2008. I'm not saying this makes Obama a better dad than Bush, or Clinton. I'm just making a comprehensive list of all the good and bad things about Obama, and I think he is a pretty good dad. We haven't gotten so bad that we don't care about this sort of thing, or elect people who are very bad to their kids.