The Ghost of a Father

When he talks today about his father's desertion, Obama frequently summons a quotation that he believes explains how it directed him. "Every man is either trying to make up for his father's mistakes or live up to his expectations," he says. Until recently, he thought it came from Lyndon B. Johnson, who had his own unresolved issues with his father.

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At one point in the campaign, Obama asked an aide to call Robert A. Caro, the preeminent Johnson biographer, to check. Caro said no, the quote was not from Johnson. The biographer was reminded, though, of something Johnson's brother had told him. The most important thing to Johnson, the brother had told Caro, was "not to be like Daddy," whom LBJ had once idolized but who later lost the family ranch and became a laughingstock.

Not to be like Daddy.

"I think he sees this as a challenge every day, that I want to do better than my father," says former federal judge Abner Mikva, a longtime Obama mentor.

When you grow up without a father, Michelle Obama says of her husband, you think about what you may have missed. "At some level, you wonder," she says. "You wonder all the time: Who would I be if I had my father in my life? Would I be a better person?"

Uncertainty crowds your mind about your own abilities. As Obama wrote in "The Audacity of Hope," his 2006 bestseller, "of all the areas of my life, it is in my capacities as a husband and father that I entertain the most doubt."

It is the reason why Dan Shomon, for many years Obama's top political aide in Illinois, urged him not to run for the U.S. Senate in 2004. "I think you're going to feel guilt about your kids," he told his boss, to no avail.

Obama hasn't found a way to reconcile his desire to be the father he never had with the long absences required of a presidential candidate. He attends parent-teacher conferences and dance recitals, and he structures his campaign day to always include a call to his daughters. But as his wife notes, "they are sometimes not ready to receive you when you call, and he has to suck that up."

"It's a struggle not just for him but for me," she says, adding that they have concluded that there is great value to their daughters in having a father with the ambition to be president. "One thing I learned from Barack is there is not one right way to parent."

Men often long for their fathers' approval, to shine in their fathers' light. Obama is asked how he feels about his father today, the dominant emotion. Regret? Unhappiness? Anger?

"I didn't know him well enough to be angry at him as a father," Obama says. "Mostly I feel a certain sadness for him, and the way that his life ended up unfulfilled, despite his enormous talents."

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