Obama Calls on Fathers to Be Responsible

Grace Metcalf, 4, waits with her sibling and mother Tina to hear Democratic presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Barack Obama campaign for president at Mount Moriah Baptist Chruch Friday June 15, 2007, in Spartanburg, S.C. Obama spoke about strengthening family values in today's economy. (AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain) (Mary Ann Chastain - AP)

SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Friday that fathers have to share the responsibility for raising children and caring for families because their role doesn't end at conception.

Days before Father's Day, the first-term Illinois senator and father of two daughters delivered his life message as well as an assessment of what government needs to do in remarks at a Baptist church.

"It's about to be Father's Day," he said. "Let's admit to ourselves that there are a lot of men out there that need to stop acting like boys; who need to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; who need to know that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise a child."

He recalled his own upbringing as the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas. Obama said he grew up with a father he know only through letters and stories told by his mothers and the relatives who raised him.

He bemoaned the nation's economic divide.

Changes in the way we "work and live have trapped too many American families between an economy that's gone global and government that's gone AWOL. Too many rungs have been removed from the ladder to middle-class security and the safety net that's supposed to break any fall from that ladder has grown badly frayed," Obama said.

The Illinois senator said he would invest $50 million in programs to help people find transitional jobs and get training for permanent employment. That is needed, he said, to help men _ especially black men _ find work to replace hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs they've lost in the last six years.

"Without a job or an education, many black men simply cannot afford to raise a family _ and too many have made the sad choice not to," he said.

He said he would push to expand the federal earned income tax credit and the minimum hourly wages should be linked to the rate of inflation.

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JOHNSTON, Iowa (AP) _ Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said Friday that it all comes down to Iowa.

"I think that anybody who wants this nomination _ not just me, but it would apply to me _ if you don't do well in Iowa it is very hard to win this nomination," he said. "I think John Kerry effectively won the nomination in 2004 when he won the Iowa caucuses."