One of President Obama's more bizarre quirks consists of referring to his "sons" when speaking in public.  (Go here to see a partial list of Obama's other outlandish comments.)

Mr. Obama has done this repeatedly; saying that if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin, and saying he wants his daughters to have the same economic opportunity as his sons. Mr. Obama seems to think his family is considerably larger than it appears. Perhaps it is a deep-seated desire to have sons? 

Mr. Obama has spent his life in a largely matriarchal familial structure. His father did more than dream; he vamoosed while Junior was still in diapers, and his step-father (Mr. Soetoro) seemed to be, well, not that important to young Barry, and he wasn't around too long. Barry's male role models were his grandfather and the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis, neither of whom were exactly fathering types. Granted, gramps had wanted a son, and had named his daughter Stanley to make the point, but he seemed to have made his daughter into the son he never had and she appears to have taken the dominant male role in Obama's life. Stan the wo-man certainly whisked young Barry around enough, smothering him in her feminine charms. There seems to have been estrogen aplenty surrounding Obama, but he lived in a testosterone wilderness, a food desert of the male hormones. Certainly his current circumstances feature an arugula-eating Amazon and two dainty young girls; hardly a he-man universe.

Dana Milbank calls Obama the first female President. So did Bonnie Erbe of PBS and Scripps-Howard , who made this claim prior to the 2008 election:

"Still Clinton's female supporters who are watching Obama's movement coalesce, solidify and take over should console themselves there will be a woman Democrat in the White House either way if the Democrats win the general election. The nominee will either be a woman with double-X chromosomes, or one with XY chromosomes who votes more like a woman than most with XX."

Is it a desire to prove his manhood, to sire sons, that drives Obama to claim male  children? Ernest Hemmingway was dressed as a girl for the first two years of his life by his mother, leading the emotionally-crippled Hemmingway to seek out all the he-man stuff he could, desperately trying to prove to himself he was not in fact a girl.  Is Obama all that different?  Does he desperately need to validate his manhood with sons?

Oops, he did it again!

Yes, Michelle (the pushup queen) invites you to sign a Father's Day card for the president, the man Native Americans long ago supposedly called the "Great White Father in Washington."

Who would want a Father's Day card signed by a bunch of strangers? Well, the Russian Czar may have; he was proclaimed the father of the Russian People and looked on his role as surrogate papa. Lord knows, Obama loves czars. Peter the Great was titled "the Great, Father of His Country, Emperor of All the Russias. " Seems Petey saw himself as the abusive father the people always wanted. Given Mr. Obama's desperate desire to get the approval of the Russians (his famous "reset" meaning craven appeasement) we must assume he has similar ambitions. Or perhaps Mr. Obama sees himself as the new George Washington, recreating the nation as Mr. Washington first created it. Washington is known as the father of his country, too. At any rate, Barack Obama has some strange notion that he's the father of us all.

Daren Jonescu has suggested that there is something more, that Obama does not speak of his biological progeny or even with the royal I, but rather believes humanity forms a composite of which he is the end product:

"He is not "all of us," in monarchical fashion. Rather, we (by which I mean all things in the known universe) are all him. Thus, he can legitimately lay claim to having sons, for all fathers are Obama. He can refer to himself as both Muslim and Christian, for all faiths are Obama. Composite girlfriends can be discussed in detail in a supposed work of non-fiction, for his romantic past includes the infinite list of all possible girlfriends, as all boyfriends are Obama.

He is the world spirit and the end of history."

Composite, world-spirit, or just over-estrosgenized, Obama has a bizarre view of fatherhood.

Of course, all Progressives see themselves as surrogate fathers to the benighted public. They think the public is so simple-minded that the average joe cannot put the correct shoe on the correct foot without government assistance. Government exists in the Progressive worldview to micromanage the behavior of the People. (This is what Benito Mussolini meant by the term Totalitarianism, which he coined not as a pejorative but as a way of saying that the State should act as an intimately involved father, a helicopter parent involved in all aspects of life.) Barack Obama undoubtedly thinks of himself as the ripest cheese in the Progressive  delicatessen, and so envisions himself as the father of fathers. 

I suspect Obama sees himself as a sort of reverse George Washington, a guy who is the father of our NEW country, the remaker of America. "We are the ones we have been waiting for" he once proclaimed, and he believes it. What Obama has sought to foster is a cult of personality, much like tinhorn dictators and Communist strongmen have sought for a long time. He seeks to portray himself as bigger than life, bigger than the average man. And the key to being bigger is to be Il Papa, the father. He wouldn't be the first man in history to attempt this trick in political life.

But it's hard to play both ends. Obama wants to capture the John F. Kennedy  persona of youth and enthusiasm and at the same time portray himself as the father. It's a dichotomy that cannot stand on its own; people don't look up to a father who is younger than they. Obama finds himself unable to make this crazy scheme work because, like everything in his life, he can't stick to it. There is no there there, because he doesn't have enough experience doing either. Obama does not share the youthful experiences of Middle America; he went from his overseas childhood to a life in a very left wing academic setting to ACORN and the political left in Chicago. He had but a few normal years in Hawaii. It seems likely that his mother was at least a left-leaning woman, and he was perhaps a red diaper baby. He simply has no connection with the American youth culture. And he certainly lacks the gravitas to appeal as a father.

It worked last time around because the media hid who Obama really is. Now, after four years of seeing the man, America knows him for a vacillating, supercilious, shallow man more at home with stuffed shirts and foreign leaders than his own people.

But it won't keep Obama from trying; he is stubborn that way.

Just call him Daddy Dearest!

Thanks to Jack Kemp for some important suggestions and editing assistance.

Timothy Birdnow is a St. Louis Based writer. His website is www.tbirdnow.mee.nu