Johann Hari: If you really want to understand what this race is about, look at the two candidates' fathers.

Johann Hari has a really interesting article in today's Independent which insists that, if you want to know who Obama and McCain really are, then you must look at their relationship with their fathers. Both men grew up with absent fathers and both men wrote books about the subject but Hari, playing amateur psychologist, finds very interesting differences in the conclusions that both men came to.

At first glance, these slabs of non-fiction – Dreams From My Father by Obama, and Faith of My Fathers by McCain – are strikingly similar. They both tell the autobiographical story of an insecure young man who flails around for an identity, and finds it by chasing the ghost of his absent father to a dangerous place far beyond the United States. Yet Obama ended up writing a complex story of colonised people – while McCain wrote a simple celebration of the coloniser.

Obama senior was a Kenyan goatherd who watched his own father brutalised by British occupiers for the crime of being "uppity." When an aide worker recognised that Obama's father was bright, he arranged for his transfer to study in the United States. There Barack Obama Snr met Obama's mother, Ann Durham, a poor white girl from Kansas, married her, had a baby, and deserted both when the young Obama was two years old, abandoning them in Hawaii.

This had a profound effect on the young Obama:

As he grew up, Obama writes: "I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant." He tried turning himself into "a caricature of black male adolescence." He tried living as a community organiser in Chicago. And – when his father died in a car crash – he tried to find it in Africa, by chasing his memory. But he discovered a father who had failed. Obama Snr. had left children strewn across the world. He had been blacklisted from the Kenyan government for speaking out against corruption; he sank into the bottle, and isolation.

It was in the slums of Kenya that Barack the son realised he was an American, tied inexorably to his country's freedoms and failings. There was no contradiction. He thought of his grandmothers – one watching her home burned down by colonisers, another hurrying at 6.30am to catch the bus to work in a bank in Hawaii – and understood: "They all asked the same thing of me, these grandmothers of mine."

Hari points out that the lessons Obama learns are what it is like to be a victim of colonialism, whereas the lesson McCain learns from his father is that colonialism is the only way to keep the natives in their place.

McCain also had an absent father, but his family were military royalty, and his father's absence was caused by serving his country at sea. McCain was taught to view his father's absence very differently from Obama. He writes, "you are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honour."

McCain also learns to have pride in the fact that he is descended from such noble stock. He writes:

"For two centuries, the men of my family were raised to go to war as officers in America's armed services." He writes of his "pride" in being descended from "the distinguished conqueror" Charlemagne.

The difference in the lessons the two men learned could not be more stark:

While Obama's father and grandfather were being whipped and detained without charge, McCain was being taught to revere the people doing it. He writes of his father: "He was a great admirer of the British Empire, crediting it with keeping 'a relative measure of peace' in the world for 'someplace in the neighbourhood of two hundred years.'" This is a view his son holds to this day – as we can see from the fact that his foreign policy adviser, Niall Ferguson, calls for the US to pick up where Britain left off. He describes his own childhood in the wreckage of Obama's Snr's Kenya as "a magical time" where "scarcely anything had changed since the days of White Mischief".

When McCain returned from his capture in Vietnam his father thought the lesson to be learned from the Vietnam war was that the US had not fought hard enough, that is should have bombed and killed even more people than it did. It appears to be a mindset that the son shares as he is still angered by what he sees as the "utterly illogical restraints on the use of American power". I suppose this is the same "utterly illogical restraint on the use of American power" which insists that it would not be wise to attack Iran as McCain seems so keen on doing.

So it is obvious that both these men learned very different things from the experience of having an absent father. Obama learned the horror of being occupied and colonised by another people, whilst McCain learnt that colonialism was sometimes the only way to ensure 'a relative measure of peace'.

Perhaps this is why both men look at Iraq and see very different things. And it's why Obama wants to withdraw and McCain would be happy to stay there for a hundred years.

Obama sees an occupied people resisting their occupiers, McCain sees a need to impose American will on recalcitrant natives.

I know which of those two mindsets I would like to see in the White House.

Click title for Hari's article. It's well worth reading.

Tags: Barack Obama, John McCain, US election 2008, Iraq war, absent fathers