Childhood pain and liberalism

It is often observed that Democrats are more depressed/pessimistic than Republicans. Part of this could be due to childhood experiences. Consider Sen. Obama who wrote about his childhood:

I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt, a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect,

Barack Obama's family situation must have been quite painful, at least if we believe the (UK) Daily Mail's research into Sen. Obama's father:

At 18, [Barack's father, Obama Sr.] married a girl called Kezia. But Obama Snr was more interested in politics and economics than his family and his political leanings had been brought to the notice of leaders of the Kenyan Independence movement. .... At the age of 23 he headed for university in Hawaii, leaving behind the pregnant Kezia and their baby son.

Relatives say he was already a slick womaniser and, once in Honolulu, he promptly persuaded a fellow student called Ann - a naive 18-year-old white girl - to marry him. Barack Jnr was born in August, 1961.

Two years later, Obama Snr was on the move again. He was accepted at Harvard, and left his little boy and wife behind when he moved to the exclusive east coast university....

...Ann divorced her husband after she discovered his bigamous double life. She remarried and moved to Indonesia with young Barack and her new husband, an oil company manager.

Obama Snr was forced to return to Kenya, where he fathered two more children by Kezia. He was eventually hired as a top civil servant in the fledgling government of Jomo Kenyatta - and married yet again.

Now prosperous with a flashy car and good salary, his third wife was an American-born teacher called Ruth, whom he had met at Harvard while still legally married to both Kezia and Ann, and who followed him to Africa.

A relative of Mr Obama says: "We told him[Barack] how his father would still go to Kezia and it was during these visits that she became pregnant with two more children. He also had two children with Ruth."

It is alleged that Ruth finally left him after he repeatedly flew into whisky-fuelled rages, beating her brutally.

Friends say drinking blighted his life - he lost both his legs while driving under the influence and also lost his job.

However, this was no bar to his womanising: he sired a son, his eighth child, by yet another woman and continued to come home drunk.

He was about to marry her when he finally died in yet another drunken crash when Obama was 21.

Alexander Hamilton was also abandoned by his father. Between the ages of 10 and 14, young Alexander was not only abandoned by his father but also his mother died, his cousin, who cared for Hamilton after his parents left, committed suicide. Also during these same years, Alexander's aunt, uncle, and grandmother died. [Src: Ron Chernow's book, p.26]. A conservative might think that abandonment by a father would lead a person to distrust authority. However, both Mr. Obama and Mr. Hamilton adopted a political belief in giving central governments more power and authority.

In contrast, while we know relatively little about the childhood of Hamilton's opponent, Thomas Jefferson, what we do know points to a relatively uneventful childhood in a stable family with none of the pain and instability that either Mr. Obama or Mr. Hamilton endured. Mr. Jefferson was early America's leading advocate of small and decentralized government.