Two years ago, when I first sent my son to day care—particularly on those mornings when he would reach his tiny hand out to me in an agonized gesture of parting sorrow—I began to ask myself: "Did Bill Clinton go to day care?" It was an effort at consolation: If the former president of the United States made it through the trial and error of being raised by a working mother, I figured, then perhaps my son, too, would enjoy as much success as I feel he deserves. As it turns out, Clinton was raised for the first year of his life by a single mother (his father died in a car accident while she was pregnant) and then went to live with his grandparents in Arkansas while she sought a nursing degree in New Orleans. It wasn't until young Bill was about to start kindergarten that his mother returned to live with him again. The hardships of Clinton's story, I discovered with some relief, far surpassed my own circumstance of maternal separation.
With this and the upcoming presidential election in mind, I recently turned to the books of John McCain and Barack Obama to investigate what kind of parenting ushers forth such ambitious leaders. The candidates have written two memoirs apiece, one about upbringing and one about career. For my purposes, I focused only on the books about family. In the course of my reading, I also came to understand the candidates in a way that I haven't in any previous election (and to feel even more confident about the vote I will cast in November).
I learned that both men come from family struggles of near-mythic proportion. Interestingly, the broad strokes of their stories are similar. Both had absent fathers—McCain's was frequently at sea as a naval submariner; Obama's left the family when his son was 2—and strong-willed mothers. Both led peripatetic childhoods, though they were both also brought up with a family-as-tribe sensibility, thanks to grandparents who helped raise each. Lastly, as both men make clear in their memoirs, their parents, as well as the hopes and disappointments they offered, are the driving force behind their ambitions.
And yet the two men are separated by not only a generation but also the social conventions of their respective eras. McCain was born on August 29, 1936; Obama was born on August 4, 1961. This gap is key to understanding, first, their exceptionally different childhoods and, second, their distinct personalities. Separated by nearly three decades, the candidates, it seems, are as defined by the years they were born as by race or religion or politics.
Next Page: "Despite the fact that both McCain and Obama have spent a good deal of their lives, and their memoirs, hunting the ghosts of their fathers, they are guided by different instincts."
