None of us are perfect, most of us decidedly imperfect, but almost all of us know that our greatest responsibility in the world — those of us who have children and even those of us who don’t — is to raise our children well, to be the best parents we can be.

Whatever you think about the Clintons and Donald Trump — about their views, values, and often questionable behavior — they evidently, despite all, raised their children decently. They paid attention. The proof is in the results. Chelsea Clinton and all the many Trump progeny are successful functioning adults, in several cases high-functioning (again, irrespective of their views — that’s irrelevant here.).

Hunter Biden is not. His life is and has been a disaster. What is the reason for that? DNA undoubtedly has influence, but so does parenting. And that’s what we control.

When your son is bounced out of the Navy for cocaine, when he has long had a drug and prostitution problem (the man also dumped his wife for his dead brother’s widow), do you allow him to use your influence to get a $50K-a-month job with a Ukrainian natural gas company? Do you reward repeated mistakes with riches in an Eastern European country? Don’t you try instead to help your son make his life better, help him deal with his obvious emotional problems first? Joe Biden himself has had considerable pain in his personal life, the deaths of a spouse and a child, but one would hope that would make him yet more attentive to those remaining children, less centered in the self. It appears not to have been so.

Let’s leave aside the quid pro quo controversy (for the moment) or whether Joe got Hunter the job in the first place or let his influence do it for him, because none of that is important in terms of parenting. He was a truly incompetent father and did exactly the wrong thing for his son, enabling him once again. His subtextual message to Hunter was “Go away. You’re bothering me. I’m doing something important.” (Really?) Or perhaps it was “I’m feeling guilty for not paying attention to you, so here’s a rich buyout. Stay off the coke this time, please.” Or maybe it was a little of both — it all comes to the same thing, an unhappy mix.

Does this pertain to how a person would function as president or whether he should be president? As we know, many residents of the White House have engaged in morally iffy activities, before and sometimes during their terms. America, however, has a family problem now, particularly in minority communities but increasingly elsewhere as well. The number of families with fathers in the home has diminished substantially. Twenty-seven percent of children were in single-parent homes in 2015 according to the census. It’s probably more now. The results have been well-documented — drug addiction, unemployment, homelessness, gangs, violence, and a growing suicide problem, particularly among young men.

We don’t need Biden in the White House for a lot of reasons, but Joe’s terrible example with Hunter is certainly one of them. How would he be as a spokesman for fathers in the home? Thankfully, it’s getting increasingly unlikely that we will have him as president anyway. Panic has set in. As I write this, news is breaking that Biden’s campaign wrote executives at ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News not to have Rudy Giuliani on the air.

It’s unclear whether this happened before Giuliani appeared on George Stephanopoulos’ “This Week” with a handful of documents demonstrating Biden and the Obama administration were up to no good in Ukraine that flustered the devout Clintonista. Rush Limbaugh is surely correct. We are in the midst of a “Cold Civil War.” Biden himself, it’s safe to predict, will soon be a sideshow, whatever his “family values.” Warren, as most realize, is already the Dems’ frontrunner. But the real action is with William Barr.

flattering On a related note — and please excuse the self-promotion, but I’m self-publishing — my new novel The GOAT , although it appears to be otherwise at first, is actually about those same “family values” at its core. (I didn’t realize this myself until the second or third draft.) Several reviews have been written, for which I am extremely grateful, but, apropos the question, this amateur review from a woman on Amazon seems to have caught that intention and touched me on a deep, personal level.

I purchased this book because I think Roger L Simon is a terrific thinker and writer, and I love to read his political commentary, but honestly, I bought it mostly to support him, thinking I would not like it much. What a surprise I was in for. A great story, beautifully and compellingly written, far more than a book about tennis, it is a compelling page turner, funny and poignant, and a terrific reminder that it is never too late to do the right thing. A wonderful book, with no political message at all, that will leave you smiling and pensive about your own life choices.

Roger L. Simon — co-founder of PJ Media — is a novelist and screenwriter.