Anton Gunn's e-mail promises I won't have a hard time picking him out in the tiffany cufflinks in Richland County, South Carolina.

He's right.

Easily the biggest guy in the room, the former offensive lineman looms over an older man in an American Legion baseball cap with whom he's chatting about local business. We're just northeast of Columbia, South Carolina's capital, in the heart of Gunn's state House district.

Gunn is used to standing out. An African American representative in a majority- white district, a Democrat in a Republican-dominated state, and a 36-year-old surrounded by career politicians, he makes a fitting messenger for Obama's campaign-trail message about the need for a new kind of politics that moves beyond traditional divisions.

The 2008 election may be long over, but Obama's campaign themes are still being put to tiffanys test in states like South Carolina. When Gunn became Obama's state political director during the all-important South Carolina primary, he had already made one run at public office and lost. After Obama won the primary, Gunn ran for state representative again. This time, he won. He has also maintained his Obama-campaign ties: Gunn is the state director for Organizing for America, the grass-roots group keeping a semblance of Obama's campaign presence alive nationwide.

Gunn clearly loves the campaign trail but also seems to enjoy the Legislature. He's as at home talking about everything from the digital divide and broadband access- "the dial tone of the future," he calls it- to tax credits for employers who provide health care to physical-education requirements in school to corruptionsponsoring a bill to fight "dudes getting money on the back end from their brother-in-law's government contract."

He has gotten involved in messy issues with special relevance to South Carolina- he joined the education superintendent in pushing for public "school choice," against some in his own party as well as Republicans who want to privatize the whole system. He also signed on to a letter to Obama from young elected officials calling for a climate deal in Copenhagen and a serious investment in sustainable-energy technology.

Gunn is up for re-election this year, and state Democratic Party activists are already floating his name for higher office. But for Gunn, South Carolina isn't a stepping stone to a national political career- it's home, one he's chosen and wants to fight for, despite the fact that Republicans are unlikely to take his hands and dance off into a bipartisan future.

Though Democrats have turned more attention to the South in recent years, the region's tiffany pendants alignment that solidified in the 1990s, in which conservative Democrats were replaced by conservative Republicans, is not likely to change soon. Ed Kilgore, editor of The Democratic Strategist and a South Carolina native, notes that many in the party still treat the region as a long shot. "We're just crazy if we don't look at the excitement the Obama nominating contest created in South Carolina," Kilgore says. It's not just Obama. Democrat Jim Rex became South Carolina's superintendent of education in 2006 by a slim margin and is now fighting for the governor's mansion. And while shouting "You lie!" at a Democratic president would have once been a near guarantee of political success in the state, pollsters have called Republican Rep. Joe Wilson's re-election fight, against a well-financed Democrat, former marine Rob Miller, one to watch.

But even where electoral victories are rare, organizing can thrive and win the occasional victory for the disenfranchised of the state. Gunn's journey from organizing outside electoral politics to working from within the political system in what most consider hostile territory for Democrats provides a glimpse into what Obama's army of organizers learned on the campaign trail- and marks one path toward a future in which true progressive politics is possible- even in South Carolina.

GUNN MOVED TO SOUTH CAROLINA for college in 1990 and has since made it his job to understand his adopted state. He played Division I football for the University of South Carolina, in Columbia. After graduating with his bachelor's in history in 1994, he went into the nonprofit world, working on children's issues and economic development. He got his real education, however, with South Carolina Fair Share, where he was hired to help low-income South Carolinians organize for affordable health care. He credits Lenora Bush Reese, who first hired him as an organizer despite his lack of experience, with shaping him as a person as well as an advocate. Many years later, he told The State newspaper, "She broadened my world view."

Fair Share fights to empower South Carolina's low-income citizens, tracks legislative activity, and provides support for other nonprofits in the state. It is officially nonpartisan, but working on issues of poverty, racial bias in mortgage lending, and healthcare reform means butting heads with the state's entrenched conservative leadership, which is adamantly opposed to public spending. Chris Kromm, director of the Institute for Southern Studies, notes that it is one of the only grass-roots organizations in the state. Erica Carter, who met Gunn in 1996 at South Carolina Fair Share, says he was "like a pit bull" with his energy and dedication to the cause. His job back then, she says, was to motivate people, to get them to fight for their own issues, and also to find out their biggest health-care concerns.

She adds, "Because of his height and his size, when he goes toe to toe with people, it's tiffany earrings to see." But like many community organizers- and like Obama in Chicago in the 1990s- Gunn saw electoral politics as an obstacle and politicians as simply people to put pressure on. When she first met him, Carter says, "It was 4I don't care what that politician has to say.'"

In 2000, when Gunn was in graduate school pursuing a master of social work, his brother Cherone was one of 17 seamen killed in the U.S.S. Cole bombing. At the memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery, Gunn spoke on behalf of the family: "I'm very proud," he said. "He made his family proud. He made his country proud." Later, he told a Washington Post reporter, "Remember, they died for the country. They died defending a country we love."

His brother's death made him deepen his commitment to community service, and Gunn says he was finally pushed to run for office by his frustration with "old-school bad politicians," who made life so hard for him as an organizer. "Who are these clowns that refuse to do what people ask them to do, and why are they there, and what can we do to get rid of them?" he asked himself.

So in 2006, Gunn ran for the state House of Representatives, losing by less than 300 votes out of 14,000 in a majority-white district long held by a white moderate Republican. "I just ran out of time," Gunn later told The State. "IfI had talked to 298 more people, then I would have won." South Carolina politics are notoriously top-down and loaded with quid pro quo endorsements. "Street money has been part of things for so long, people don't even question the ethics of it anymore," Kilgore says. But even though he lost, Gunn's upstart campaign surprised cynics. He took the rest of 2006 off, and in January of 2007, when much of the Democratic old guard had already been snapped up by then-presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, Gunn was one of the new crowd brought in to help elect "that skinny dude from Illinois," as Gunn jokingly calls him. He had recently stumbled across The Audacity of Hope in an airport bookstore and says he was drawn in by the message as much as the idea of an Obama presidency-and knew he had to get involved. (He was clearly inspired by Obama: Gunn's first book, self-published last year, is called TheAudacity of Leadership.) Gunn famously called Obama to say, "I may not know a whole lot about politics, but I know a lot about South Carolina." He was hired. Early on in the primary, Clinton was getting as much African American support as Obama. The post-election narrative that black voters were in the bag for the black candidate from the start- fostered in part by Bill Clinton's comments comparing Obama's campaign to Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 primary efforts in the statewas far from true. At times, Gunn and tiffany necklaces on the campaign had to push Obama to court black voters. The New York Times reported that, on the night before the primary, Gunn pushed hard to get the candidate to attend a gala for the African American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, enlisting Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett in his effort.

"We were being told at every barbershop and beauty shop we went into that this was Clinton country," says Gillian Bergeron, who was an early campaign staffer in the state. At her very first staff meeting, Gunn laid out the rules. "Under no circumstances are we going to do South Carolina politics as usual. We're not paying for a vote, we're not paying for an endorsement, and we're not going to talk about the fact that other candidates are doing that," Bergeron recalls him saying.

She continues, "Considering how much I heard from ministers or 'neighborhood leaders' saying, If you want the black vote you've got to pay for it,' I can't imagine what he was hearing as our political director."

Gunn stuck with the organizing strategies he'd mastered at Fair Share, talking to people in their homes, hangouts, and churches and registering new voters. In the end, more than eight out of 10 black voters went for Obama. Kilgore notes that the campaign managed to get black voters to turn out for Obama without heightening the severe racial polarization of the state. "[It was] an example of how you can use an organizing method that not only works and makes people feel empowered in a way that just giving them a ride to the polls doesn't," Kilgore says. The massive Obama victory in South Carolina- 55 percent to Clinton's 27 percent- was the moment that the Obama campaign proved its wider ability to win- even without the establishment.

Carter, Gunn's former community-organizing colleague from Fair Share, says that the Obama campaign shaped Gunn as much as he shaped it. "Now he's seasoned a little bit," Carter says. "He understands that politics can be tricky and you have to finesse people. You can't make enemies out of everybody."

After the primary, many of the organizers from South Carolina packed up and state-hopped around the country, getting promoted again and again within the campaign until they landed in administration jobs. Gunn could have done the same, but Bergeron says he "stayed with his original vision." He returned to his district to run for the state House again. Excitement over Obama's candidacy and the infrastructure from the campaign were fueling voter turnout, and some Obama supporters offered financial backing as well- Gunn drew nearly $80,000 in donations from around the nation. But he stuck with the strategy that had served the Obama campaign so well: Gunn went door to door, reaching out voter by voter in his sprawling district.

And this time, he won.

SPANNING PARTS OF RICHLAND and Kershaw counties, Gunn's district is nearly three times the size of other state House districts and is the fastest-growing in the state. It's mostly suburban, with some rural areas, and most of the population growth comes from people who relocate from the North or whom Gunn calls "half backs"-people who moved to Florida and then came halfway back up the East Coast. People's incomes as well as their education levels are higher here than in most of the state, though still below the national average. Forty percent of the voters in 2008 were African American; the first time Gunn ran, 68 percent of the voters were white.

To stay in touch with the people in his district, Gunn has been holding town-hall meetings- "not ginned-up town hall meetings" but regular opportunities to converse with voters. Many of the constituents he faced at the three town halls he held in August and the three in December were not supporters, to put it mildly. But, Gunn says, "I get encouraged by people who didn't vote for me who say, 'Keep speaking the truth. Don't tell us what we want to hear, tell us what we need to hear.'"

Still, he faces challenges. Gunn notes that people still come to town meetings unsure of what their state representative actually does. "I get a lot of calls that say, 'Dismantle the IRS, government is bad, don't vote for cap-and-trade'- first of all, I'm not in Congress so I don't get to vote for those things," Gunn says. Yet he's frequently the target of critiques of the president. "'Obamacare is socialism, Obama's a communist.' I've gotten called all of those things. It's painful to hear that resentment," he says. Whether or not he agrees with the Glenn Beck fans in his district, Gunn knows he has to try to understand them. More important, he has to try to get them to understand him.

Progressives might be angry with Obama's professed commitment to bipartisanship at a time when Democrats enjoy a large majority in Congress, but to get anything done in South Carolina, possibly the most conservative and Republican state in the country, Gunn has to work with the other side and try to win over Republican voters. "There were people who had my yard sign right next to John McCain's yard sign," he notes.

Gunn says he's focused on doing what he can while he's in office- which is why he's co-sponsored 204 pieces of legislation -and colleagues from across the aisle vouch for his willingness to try to bridge the party gap. "He works to find common ground, which is something we need more of in politics," says state Rep. Nathan Ballentine, who sits next to Gunn in the House. Ballentine is a Republican, but he and Gunn have cosponsored a couple of bills- including a proposal to amend the state constitution's ballot-initiative process- a cross-party collaborative effort he says is rare in the South Carolina Legislature. In the latest budget fight, Gunn managed to get passed an amendment focused on government transparency, a difficult feat even for Republicans.

Kromm says of Gunn, "Because of his background with Fair Share, he brings an insider/outsider perspective to politics. He definitely wants to be and is an emerging political leader, but he has one foot outside realizing that we need a movement behind it, we need organizing behind it. He's going to maintain that critical distance." As Gunn likes to say, "People don't vote rationally; they vote emotionally." But his very success might belie that observation. To get elected, he had to convince at least some people to put aside emotional reactions and actually listen to him, to talk about issues like sewer problems on one side of his district and traffic on the other. To stay in office, he'll have to keep talking about the issues he can actually do something about.

Those in his party seem pretty satisfied with Gunn's approach. As Terry Bergeron, a Democratic Party activist and mother of Gillian, said when she introduced Gunn at a rally this summer on Hilton Head Island: "Remember the name Anton Gunn. You'll be voting for him when he runs for statewide office."

THERE'S A SENSE AMONG SOME state Democrats that this could be the year when they begin to make some gains. After all, South Carolina Republicans have made all sorts of negative headlines lately. Some, like Rep. Joe Wilson and Sen. Jim DeMint (known for his obstruction of Obama's nominees and his visit to the coup government in Honduras), are still popular with their conservative base. Others, like embattled Gov. Mark Sanford, have embarrassed their party to the point of impeachment. Sanford is protected only by the fact that his would-be replacement, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, has embarrassments of his own, ranging from multiple traffic offenses to a vicious rant against people who receive public assistance.

A plurality of voters say the state is headed in the wrong direction, and Republicans seem to have lost sight of the compromise that had allowed them to govern the state for most of the last two decades. In the 1990s, South Carolina Republicans managed to temper fire-breathing conservatives who wanted to keep the Confederate flag on the state's Capitol with more moderate, business-oriented figures, like the late Gov. Carroll Campbell Jr., who want the low-wage, anti-union state to remain controversy-free and attractive to employers. "As long as the Republicans continue to mismanage- which they will- there are always going to be opportunities in the South," Kilgore says. In Gunn's view, issues such as poverty (15.1 percent of South Carolinians lived below the poverty line in 2007) and the economic crisis have lessened people's appetite for hyperpartisan bickering. "They're sick and tired of being laughed at by the entire nation," he says. "They're sick and tired of being ranked at the top of everything bad and at the bottom of everything good." The number of Democrats in the state is on the rise, partly due to transplants from more progressive areas of the country. Though the state doesn't track voter registration by party, a 2008 survey found 34 percent identified as Democratic and 33.5 percent identified as Republican.

Nora Kravec, a volunteer with Organizing for America, notes that the group has picked up new volunteers who weren't part of the campaign, and OFA has maintained staff in Charleston, where she lives, as well as in Columbia. "We've gotten a few people who've said, 'Boy, I wish I'd done this before,'" she says. Volunteers collect declarations of support for the health-care bill, hold rallies, and attend church events like they did on the campaign trail. Kilgore points out that just having a Democratic infrastructure in place in the state is a huge step forward. "The last successful Democratic year, in 1998, when we won the governorship and Senator Fritz Hollings managed to hang on for another term, the campaign was totally financed by the video-poker industry," he says.

The divides in the state are still vicious- Ballentine expresses disappointment that most votes in the Legislature break down along party lines, and Gunn says that some Republicans will agree with him behind closed doors but won't vote that way when it comes to the floor. Andre Bauer's comments comparing poor people to "stray tiffany accessories" and Wilson's shout heard round the country may be extreme examples, but Gunn points out that they come out of a particular political climate.

"If you'd have told me someone was going to scream at the president and call him a liar, he'd have been the last person on my list. Joe is an aw-shucks kind of guy," Gunn says. "When you want to breed negativity, it can infect anybody, and it can take people to a level they didn't think was possible."

Kravec calls Sheri Few, Gunn's 2010 opponent, a "tea bagger," and Gunn notes that Few uses the tea party-style anti-Obama rhetoric against him. Her support of tax credits for parents sending their children to private schools makes her a polarizing candidate in a district that actually has some of the state's best schools, and she's run several times and lost, but Gunn notes that she has always been well funded.

Still, people seem to want to hear what Gunn is saying-Kravec says that his involvement in an event guarantees a crowd, and she thinks he could win higher office. If he has political aspirations beyond South Carolina, Gunn doesn't talk about them. "This is my home. I want to do everything in my power to make this state great. I'm invested. I have a 4-yearold girl who's going to grow up in this state," he says.

He continues, "We still do have our pockets of those folks who want to hold on to the old vestiges of South Carolina from yesteryear, and they have their influence. That's why the Confederate flag still flies, but I don't really care. ... What's more important is figuring out how we get to the nitty-gritty on issues like education, which is the great equalizer. There are people who try to hold us back, but as the days go by, there's a lot less of them and a lot more of me."

Gunn doesn't want to fight the culture wars- he talks public-school choice and small-business tax credits, not abortion rights and marriage equality. He downplays traditionally explosive racial issues and calls the Confederate-flag issue a distraction. But as Kilgore says, it's almost impossible to ignore race in South Carolina.

"It's never going to go away," Gunn says. "The vast majority of progress has been made over the last 40 years, which is only a tenth of the time that it has been a problem." Still, he points out that race is only one piece of the messy puzzle that makes up his opposition. "You also have some people who I think are not focused on race; they're rightly focused on the debt of our country, the economy, and the only person they can see who should be doing something about that is the leader of the free world."

Kilgore thinks that the Obama campaign and people like Gunn, who both influenced and were influenced by the election, laid a path for organizing in the South that goes beyond racial polarization. Kromm notes, "You have the makings of something different, but it has to be nourished, it has to be strengthened, it has to be invested in." As the OFA state director, Gunn is tasked with maintaining some of that investment. While other state legislators also have day jobs- Ballentine works at Wells Fargo- Gunn's day job is keeping South Carolinians involved in progressive politics. From new-media tools (he's a frequent Twitterer) to door-to-door canvassing and visiting churches and union events, Gunn and OFA are focused on the issues- health care, education, and jobs, jobs, jobs- not the implications for the national Democratic Party. We've seen Democrats lose elections this year when they've lost touch with the people, and Gunn isn't likely to forget that. It's not hyperbole when he says, "We literally changed the course of American political history by what we did here in South Carolina during the primary."

Daddy Issues
Of the many biographical details that shaped Barack Obama as a political figure, perhaps none is more prominent than the absence of his father during his upbringing. The president's public effort to understand Barack Obama Sr. began with the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, shortly after he finished his term as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. In the book, Obama describes how difficult it was to grow up without a relationship to his Kenyan father, the man who gave him a name and a heritage but was not around to help him navigate America's complicated racial divide. In The Audacity of Hope, written after he became a senator, Obama describes his own struggles as a political father who is often physically separated from his family.

At the height of the Democratic primary in 2008, Obama gave a Father's Day address at a predominantly black Chicago church. Single-parent homes are more common in the black community, and his speech encouraged young men to grow up and to take responsibility for their children. "We need to show our kids that you're not strong by putting other people downyou're strong by lifting them up," he said. "That's our responsibility as fathers." After the speech, the Rev. Jesse Jackson excoriated Obama for "talking down to black people."

Obama's rhetoric on fatherhood can sound a lot like the personal-responsibility talking points of many conservative black leaders. For white Americans, it can reinforce the notion that some problems are endemic to the black community- and that if black fathers would live up to their responsibilities, the problems of black children would just go away.

But for many, Obama's speeches acknowledge a real problem: More than half of African American children are born to single mothers. Obama tells the black community they have the power to change this, a message that resonates because Obama's personal history gives him some authority to address the issue. Juan Williams, a National Public Radio news analyst, said in December that there's at least anecdotal evidence that Obama's life story is an inspiration for young black men. At a conference of three major black fraternities, Williams heard men say things like, "If Barack Obama, who came from a broken household, can do it, we can do it too."

Obama is careful to never say they can do it without helphe regularly addresses how government can meet families halfway. The proposals he outlined in his 2008 speech on fatherhood- better family-leave policies for workers, more job-training opportunities for fathers- are designed to help parents, especially low-income ones. But exactly how absentee fathers factor into the cycle of poverty - and whether encouraging their involvement should be an explicit goal of programs designed to help low-income communities- is the subject of considerable debate. Research shows that the children of single parents are five times as likely to be poor, are more likely to become teenage parents themselves, have worse educational outcomes, and are more likely to end up in prison. Widely discussed studies have now shown that the way parents interact with their children before they reach kindergarten greatly affects how children do once they're there. The question, given all these facts, is whether simply encouraging absent fathers to get involved with their children is enough.

Last year, Obama addressed a group of community leaders, fathers, and children from schools near D.C. in a speech meant to kick off a national conversation on fatherhood. He noted that his accomplishments were due to the efforts of his mother and grandparents but added, "Despite all their extraordinary love and attention that doesn't mean I didn't feel my father's absence. That's something that leaves a hole in a child's heart that a government can't fill."

Indeed, Obama has never suggested it should, but he has acknowledged the government can encourage fathers to get more involved. This marks a slight departure from his predecessor. For George W. Bush and his fellow conservatives, involved fathers were important because nuclear families were important. Advocates for anti-poverty programs grew frustrated with Bush because both his rhetoric and his policies emphasized personal and familial responsibility, as if all poor families lacked were moral values. He allocated federal money to programs that promoted marriage, but the bill authorizing the funds did not use language that restricted their use for low-income families exclusively; they were open to anyone.

Now, under Obama, fatherhood programs and marriage initiatives are poised to get more funding. His 2011 budget allocates money under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also known as welfare-to-work, for a new initiative intended to help parents with barriers to self-sufficiency. A parallel Obama effort, the "conversation on fatherhood," run by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships, targets Americans of all income levels but doesn't administer grant money.

By reorienting the intent of the fatherhood programs, Obama reinforces the idea that poorer families might benefit from them. In his budget, Obama also increases funding for other programs designed to help poor families, a step many liberals would applaud. But his funding for fatherhood and family programs concedes that his goal isn't just making poverty less devastating by providing steady child care, better health-care coverage, and more work-training options for lowincome men and women. It emphatically states that the broad effort of reducing poverty is furthered by putting fathers back in low-income homes and helping couples stay married.

If his ultimate goal is indeed poverty reduction, not reinforcing "traditional" values, should Obama attempt to tackle poverty itself and trust that higher incomes will lead to more involved parenting? Or does he attack the symptom of low-income absentee fathers directly and hope their involvement will break the cycle of poverty? He seems to be trying to do both.

THE ROLE OF FATHERS IS A relatively new addition to the conversation about children and poverty. Since the Great Depression, government efforts to help the poor have mostly targeted poor mothers with young children. The Great Society legislation in the 1960s expanded those efforts to the poor in general, but much of the funding remained focused on mothers. As Rickie Solinger argues in her 1999 essay published in Whose Welfare?, single mothers were seen as psychically troubled and in need of help from the state.

By the 1980s and 1990s, however, unlimited welfare was seen as problematic. The Clinton administration made a push to get women off the rolls. One of the ways to do that was to increase the help women received from noncustodial fathers, primarily through enforcing child-support payments. But when agencies tried to track down fathers and get them to pay, they found that many men were unemployed or underemployed and unable to meet their obligations. Community groups that had already been working to help men get job training and steady employment now had the federal government's attention through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which was created by the 1996 welfare-reform bill.

While TANF made maintaining two-parent families a goal, its primary focus was economic support for low-income parents and their children. That focus changed in 2001, when Bush started the National Healthy Marriage Initiative, devoting $90 million to marriage-promotion programs. The funding was administered by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. And the programs- which were essentially marriage-counseling sessions- were based on the idea that declining marriage rates and ascending divorce rates were the source of society's problems and that promoting marriage would be the cure.

There is, as yet, no hard evidence that the programs work at reducing poverty. Groups that help coordinate these programs, like the National Fatherhood Initiative, cite many personal stories of couples who say the programs were helpful. It's easy to see how a forum in which husbands and wives can talk about their frustrations and problems as a couple make them feel better. It's harder to see how that may translate into food on the table and college tuition for their children.

But there are stories of people who say they benefit. Dawit Solomon, a 29-year-old who was raised by a single mother, finished a class last year that he says has changed his relationship with his 10-year-old son. Solomon's girlfriend got pregnant in his senior year of high school, and they did not marry. For most of his relationship with her and their son, Daquan, Solomon felt his main purpose was to pay child support. "I didn't feel like I didn't have responsibilities," he said. "I didn't know what it's like to be a dad."

After he fell behind on his child support, Solomon was ordered by the court to attend fatherhood classes with a group in Alexandria, Virginia. He could have stopped going after three classes but chose to finish the 12-week course and has emerged as its evangelist. "I was always angry at the system, felt like it was always unfair to the father," he said. That anger reached back into his relationship with his absent father, extended to his relationship with his son's mother, and refracted, he now feels, to affect the relationship he had with his son. He often saw Daquan on weekends but would plop him in front of a video game while he went about his business. The class taught him to let go of his anger and to spend time with his son.

Solomon's class used curriculum from the National Fatherhood Initiative, a group founded in 1994 that has helped shape the nationwide efforts to address fatherless families. A former president of the group, Wade Horn, was tapped by Bush to shape many of the ACF's healthy-marriage policies. Before joining the ACF, Horn wrote, "States should begin by eliminating systemic preferences that give advantages to single-parent families over two-parent, married families. But making welfare neutral when it comes to marriage is grossly insufficient." That children of single parents needed more help was irrelevant.

When Congress reauthorized TANF in 2006, it shifted away from promoting two-parent households as a means to help reduce poverty rates to promoting marriage as a goal in and of itself, setting aside $150 million for programs designed to encourage healthy marriages. (The grants were authorized for five years.) A 2006 statement from the ACF decries "divorce, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbearing" before it even mentions low-income children. When children are mentioned, it's to note that the ACF already has contact with them through several poverty-reduction programs. The language that established the new fatherhood and marriage-promotion programs did not limit them to low-income families. They could be used by any father or couple.

And that's the problem, some community groups say. These programs weren't focused on addressing poverty, and they supplanted more practical efforts such as job training and job placement, which had to compete for funding. Groups that work directly with mothers and fathers of low-income children are split on whether the programs were helpful at all, according to a report from the Center for Family Policy and Practice. Many groups think the programs are beside the point: Lowincome men have basic problems staying stably employed, housed, and fed. Even groups that felt the marriage programs were useful and helped their clients did not think they were important outside the context of job-training, skills-training, and other economic-support programs.

"I don't even want to judge whether or not an individual mother or father or person wants that kind of service or needs it or can benefit from it," says the center's co-director, Jacquelyn Boggess. "We all can benefit from that. But to actually take away the services that respond to economic insecurity and then put in the one about being a better spouse or parent. ... I can't see that as beneficial."

In the meantime, Erick King, who, along with his twin brother, created the fatherhood class in Alexandria, said the group is trying to get federal funding, but the signals from the federal government are ambiguous. The program has so far relied on private donations totaling about $100,000. King, 31, was inspired by his own troubled history with his father and his work as a juvenile probation officer. Through his work with juveniles in the court system, King has come to believe one of the primary reasons young people get in trouble is a lack of parenting at home. "It's the root of the problem," he says. "There's no substitute for the father being in their life. If that's the root cause, let's address it at the root cause."

King says the men come to the class with a range of experiences, but the absence of their own fathers is a commonality. Twenty-seven men graduated last year, the first year of the program's existence, and about 80 percent were referred through the court system because of child support or family court cases. The men ranged in age from their teens to their 60s and mostly represented the bottom of the income ladder, making no more than about $40,000 a year. The group uses a curriculum supplied by the National Fatherhood Initiative but also tries to respond to the needs of the men they meet, including jobplacement programs. This year, meeting with job-assistance groups will be a requirement to pass. But graduating just means showing up and participating in most of King's classes, which involve sessions in which men talk about their relationships to their father, take their children on community outings, and hear lectures from domestic-violence experts. There is no nationally recognized fatherhood curriculum. And while King follows the men post-graduation by communicating with their caseworkers, it's too early to tell what kinds of outcomes programs like his will produce.

OBAMA'S 2011 BUDGET REMOVES the $150 million marriage-promotion funding that started under Bush and creates a new program called the Fatherhood, Marriage and Families Innovation Fund backed by $500 million. The budget also extends TANF for a year, to the end of 2011, and increases the amount of funding for TANF and the agency that administers it, the Administration for Children and Families. It will probably take a generation to determine whether these programs really help reduce poverty, because such an assessment depends on children's outcomes in adulthood. The budget, though, does allow for some of the money to be used to evaluate fatherhood programs. The Department of Health and Human Services says the new fatherhood program will be a more comprehensive effort. The details, however, are still unclear.

Obama's other new effort, the conversation on fatherhood, will be run outside the ACF, through the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Even the office, a renamed expansion of one Bush founded, seems to have a different mission than that of its predecessor. Bush argued that faith-based groups, which have a long history of helping the needy in America, were unable to compete for federal grants with government agencies on a level playing field. Critics believed that funding faith-based groups robbed government programs of much-needed dollars and helped Bush funnel money to friends or programs that shared his moral views. Obama has said that, rather than helping faith-based groups to get more federal money, his office will listen to community groups about what needs they see on the ground and use that information to inform federal policy.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama talks about how his own struggle to be a father without a model on which to base his relationship with his daughters is the same struggle faced by a new generation of fathers. He lays out a path for encouraging fathers' participation that strikes a note in the center: "Policies that strengthen marriage for those who choose it and that discourage unintended births outside of marriage are sensible goals to pursue." But he criticizes the conservative view that we should be attempting to return to a "bygone era" by making divorce difficult, strictly defining gender roles, and shaming those who practice sex outside of marriage and have children outside of wedlock. Instead, Obama encourages supporting community programs that provide complete sexeducation and marriage-education workshops. "Expanding access to such services to low-income couples, perhaps in concert with job training and placement, medical coverage, and other services already available, should be something everybody can agree on," he writes. A member of Obama's faithbased council drew fire in May for saying the office should look beyond hetero-normative views of fatherhood, another sign the office is more about helping families, whatever their shape, and not about regulating values.

Not everyone agrees fatherhood programs should be part of the antipoverty agenda, but at least Obama's approach acknowledges that men have problems separate from their ability to be marriage partners. For example, a 2006 TANF reauthorization bill Obama co-sponsored that never passed would have supplied money for job training for ex-offenders, men who often leave prison with child-support debt and have a harder time getting new jobs. That component was spun out to be part of the stimulus bill and funded with $15 million, and Obama's focus on jobs and unemployment in areas other than TANF is intended to help low-income families along with everyone else.

Roland Warren, the current president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, says Obama's focus on jobs might be the biggest change, but he hasn't lost sight of the importance of the relationships parents have. "I think, from a practical standpoint, funding for marriage is part of the mix," Warren says. "I haven't heard any discussion about not funding the marriage stuff."

The 2006 bill concedes the problems children have in singleparent homes, but it also acknowledges the role poverty might play in the creation of those homes, citing high rates of unemployment, low wages, and domestic violence as primary reasons marriages break up and fathers aren't involved in their children's Uves. To that end, Obama's Department of Health and Human Services budget, the umbrella under which the ACF is funded, also provides money for researching the best earlychildhood programs and the best ways to help low-income families become self-sufficient. It also provides community block grants to encourage better grocery stores to move into low-income areas and other programs that, if implemented, could make the job of being a low-income parent easier. It's classic Obama; it addresses a view that is, on its face, unobjectionable: It's a good thing for fathers to take responsibility for their children, develop nurturing relationships with them, and promote their positive growth. Then it acts on that view in a way that supports the practical goals of liberalism- helping parents find jobs, expanding early-childhood programs, and rejuvenating the low-income rental market so they can provide the basics for their children.

In the first year of the Obama administration, when the TANF funding for marriage initiatives was still on autopilot, groups that work with fathers hoped Obama would push for his 2006 bill, which they found more sensible. Now those groups are figuring out how to react to Obama's proposais in his 2011 budget. The bill he co-sponsored in 2006 is still sitting in Congress, now sponsored by Sens. Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, Tim Johnson, and Roland Burris, and went to the Senate Finance Committee before Father's Day. It has remained there and is now unlikely to move since TANF has another year before it needs to be addressed. Some of the changes it would have made are now moot, as long as Obama's budget passes. With other big legislative priorities sucking up oxygen, like health care and jobs, it's not certain how much attention it will get.

Still, because the details on the new program have yet to be hammered out, and all advocates have to go on is a paragraph in the budget and a brief statement from the Department of Health and Human Services, some look back at the way Obama has talked about fatherhood and poverty. Rhetoric on responsible fatherhood that has the potential to inspire is all well and good as long as there is money to help with the very real needs of the poorest families.

Meanwhile, Obama still leverages his personal story to try to inspire young men despite the hardships they've faced. At his 2009 Father's Day talk, Obama addressed the male students in the authence, acknowledging they might worry that they don't know how to be fathers if their own fathers were absent.

"Some of you might even use that as an excuse and say, well, if my dad wasn't around, why should I be," he said. "Let's be clear: Just because your own father wasn't there for you, that's not an excuse for you to be absent also. It's all the more reason for you to be present. There's no rule that says that you have to repeat your father's mistakes. Just the opposite: You have an obligation to break the cycle, and to learn from those mistakes, and to rise up where your own fathers fell short, and to do better than they did with your own children. That's what I've tried to do in my life."