Bill Clinton Is a Mama's Boy

May 12, 2006 — -- Former President Clinton is a mama's boy.

"Absolutely," Clinton said. "And I still think about my mother all of the time."

Statistics show that fatherless boys are often part of what's wrong with society, but in honor of Mother's Day, Bill Weir, a product of a single mother, sat down with a former U.S. president, a senator, a football star, and a best-selling author who all owe their success to mom.

"My mother was the one constant in my life," said Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. "When I think about my mom raising me alone when she was 20, and working and paying the bills, and, you know, trying to pursue your own dreams, I think is a feat that is unmatched."

Clinton has the same admiration for the sacrifices his mother made.

"She went back to nursing school so that she could earn an income to support me," Clinton said. "She had no way of knowing she'd remarry or if so, when. And she had to leave me with her parents, which was agonizing for her. One of my earliest memories is, she knelt by the railroad track and cried when I left, pulled out of the station to go back home to Arkansas."

Best-selling author J.R. Moehringer remembers the lies that his mother told to protect him.

"When we were living on food stamps and I found food stamps in her purse, she told me they were coupons because she didn't want me going to school thinking we were living on food stamps," he said. "I really love her for that lie."

Like many boys being raised by their mom, young Moehringer felt protective of his mother when she dated.

"Some of the guys I liked and some of them I didn't, and I would greet them at the door like the man of the house, you know, with a metaphorical baseball bat, and I'd grill 'em," Moehringer said. "But I do wonder sometimes, if I hadn't been around, if she might have found happiness with those guys, and it, and it makes me worry, you know."

Moehringer's mom never remarried so he found surrogate fathers bellied up to the bar where his uncle worked, good-natured souls that fill his memoir.

Football star Warrick Dunn learned manhood on the streets and from his coaches. Obama's mother brought home the best kind of stepfather.