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.
