I often wonder how many kids look at our current president the way I once looked at President Clinton. Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal.

I suspected that there were skeletons lurking in his closet, too. Surely this was a man with a secret sex addiction, or at least an alcohol problem. I secretly guessed that before the end of his term, some major personal scandal would reveal his family life to be a sham. I disagreed with many of his positions, so perhaps a dark part of me wanted such a scandal to come out. But it never came. He and his wife treated each other with clear love and respect, and he adored and cared for his children. Whatever scars his childhood left, he refused to let those scars control him.

The president’s example offered something no other public figure could: hope. I wanted so desperately to have what he had — a happy marriage and beautiful, thriving children. But I thought that those things belonged to people unlike me, to those who came from money and intact nuclear families. For the rest of us, past was destiny. Yet here was the president of the United States, a man whose history looked something like mine but whose future contained something I wanted. His life stood in stark contrast to my greatest fear.

Eventually, I achieved something roughly similar to the president’s early, personal accomplishments: a prestigious law degree, a strong professional career and a modicum of fame as a writer. There were many personal heroes in my life: aunts and uncles, a protective sister, a father who re-entered my life at the right time. But I benefited, too, from the example of a man whose public life showed that we need not be defeated by the domestic hardships of youth.

It is one of the great failures of recent political history that the Republican Party was too often unable to disconnect legitimate political disagreements from the fact that the president himself is an admirable man. Part of this opposition comes from this uniquely polarized moment in our politics, part of it comes from Mr. Obama’s leadership style — more disconnected and cerebral than personal and emotive — and part of it (though a smaller amount than many on the left suppose) comes from the color of his skin.