Doug Thorburn on Early-Stage Alcohol and Drug Addiction

Presidential Contenders: Sons of Alcoholics

Presidential contenders Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain may be members of different parties, hold opposite views on many subjects and have very different ancestral backgrounds. They have, however, one key similarity: they are both sons of alcoholics.

Barack Obama Sr. met Ann Dunham while both were studying at the University of Hawaii in 1959. In 1962, a year after their son was born, Barack Sr. won a graduate scholarship to Harvard and left, never to return. Sen. Barack Obama was abandoned by his father before he was old enough to remember him.

While earning a masters degree in economics at Harvard, Obama Sr. became a fixture in bars, chain-smoking and ordering scotch straight up by the “double-double.”He referred to beer as a “child’s drink”. Although there is no record of him completing his doctorate, in typical alcoholic hyperbole Obama often introduced himself as “Dr.”The elder Obama returned to his native Kenya with his new wife, a school teacher he met while at Harvard. Although friends explained that Obama was “a creature of time and culture,”his is drinking binges, which strained both career and marriage, indicated alcoholism. In the grand paradox that is alcoholism, this compelled him to expose fraud, lambaste government policies and publicly contradict superiors, while belittling co-workers. His alcoholic sense of invincibility resulted in injuries from several car accidents (by itself a clue to alcoholism, as discussed in “Get Out of the Way! How to Identify and Avoid a Driver Under the Influence”), beginning as early as 1965. As obvious as the answer is to the addiction-aware, it is reported that everyone asked “what happened”after he was killed in a one-car crash in 1982.

Sen. Obama has spoken often of his father’s abandonment and readily admits he became more driven to make up for his father’s shortcomings and troubled life. He is indeed a non-alcoholic child of an alcoholic, which is often manifested in overachievement. Fortunately, this results not so much from a need to inflate the ego as to compensate for the behaviors of the parent. While he does so in classic idealist iNtuitive Feeling (Myers-Briggs/Keirsey) fashion as a writer and in his search for self-identity, it takes an unusual twist in his desire to move beyond being merely the leader of movements (in line with fellow idealists Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.). This may be best explained by his need to do penance for his father’s sins. (Emily Yoffe’s piece delves further into the Psychological Types of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. While she may or may not be dead-on regarding specific Type, I think she’s correctly identified the Keirseyan Temperaments.)

Sen. John McCain has written that his father “drank too much”even though he “didn’t drink at work”and “was never incapacitated by his weakness.”He explained, “As with most people, drinking changed his personality in unattractive ways. When he was drunk, I did not recognize him.”

Sen. McCain, too, is likely driven to overachieve to compensate for his alcoholic father’s behaviors while drinking. This indicates a gross misunderstanding of alcoholism, perhaps as a result of being around too many alcoholics. His comment, “As with most people,”is not only wrong, but dangerously so. The personalities of non-alcoholics don’t change much while drinking, and certainly not in “unattractive ways.”The fact that McCain has been around so many alcoholics that he thinks “most”people become unrecognizable while drunk suggests he is accustomed to the behaviors of alcoholics and that he might fail to get out of their way before they become dangerous.

Children of alcoholics usually either react to the dysfunction or learn some of the misbehaviors. Obama wasn’t with his father long enough to learn from him, but clearly reacted to his absence (iNtuitive Feelers experience issues over abandonment). Often, such children react by becoming sexually compulsive, spendthrifts or compulsive gamblers. Obama’s idealism perhaps helped him to instead become more introspective and to find ways to improve the world around him (even if we may disagree with his methods). Although I haven’t read his books, the first of which he published at age 34, some critics suggest an attitude problem that he may have since outgrown. Children of alcoholics, especially the introspective type, can grow emotionally in spurts in their 30s and 40s.

McCain’s clear Artisan Temperament (probably ESTP, who has a need to do what he wants when he feels like it), in conjunction with the influence of his alcoholic father, could explain much of his wild youth. He earned a reputation as a party man, drove a Corvette and became a fighter pilot from aircraft carriers while studies ranked far below his social life (he was 5th from the bottom of his class). Unlike Obama, McCain was in a position to learn from his alcoholic biological father. According to biographer Matt Welch, McCain was startlingly violent well into his 20s. Once, drunk on shore leave, he charged into a brawl between Marines and sailors and admits he “loved”such encounters. While still hot-tempered, he has clearly mellowed, as we would expect of a non-alcoholic child of an alcoholic in his later years. The mellowing, including conciliation with his North Vietnamese captors, suggests that McCain is not alcoholic, although the issue is not free from doubt. If he has “stopped”drinking, he is probably a recovering alcoholic.

Additionally, Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was likely alcoholic. He is the one who uprooted Ann Dunham and her young son and moved, when Barack was only six, to what was then one of the most troubled places on earth, Indonesia. Although Lolo was Muslim, according to Stephen Mansfield in “The Faith of Barack Obama,” he “lived on the folk edge of Islam,”teaching young Barack apparently non-Muslim notions such as the idea that we take on the powers of whatever we eat. More telling, he also “loved women, drink, and Western music. Obama would later recall his stepfather’s passion for Johnny Walker Black….”Rare is the drinker who has a “passion”for a particular drink who isn’t alcoholic. Lolo died of a “liver ailment”at age 51.

Obama lived with his stepfather for only a few years. If there was alcoholism there was probably at the very least some degree of psychological or verbal abuse. That would have had some effect on a young Obama and the process of maturation. Although there is no direct evidence that Ann Dunham was alcoholic, she married one and possibly two alcoholics”which suggests a deep codependence and need to enable poor behaviors.

My main concerns about children of alcoholics”and I speak from the experience alluded to in “Drunks, Drugs & Debits: How to Recognize Addicts and Avoid Financial Abuse””include stunted emotional growth, a need for control and a tendency to enable poor behaviors. Alcoholics in recovery admit their emotional growth stopped the day they triggered their alcoholism”usually about age 14. Children of alcoholics probably grow emotionally at about half the rate of non-alcoholic children of non-alcoholics, at least until they understand their parent’s problem. In an attempt to compensate for the lack of control in their own lives, they often try to exert control over others, sometimes by enabling. They can grow up and out of these character defects, but only after time and work. As American citizens who will have one as their leader for the next four years, we can only hope that McCain has had enough time and Obama has done enough introspection to get beyond the worst manifestations of these flaws.