Thursday, January 22, 2009

New President

I decided to write up a post about the inauguration of our new President of the United States. I tuned in over the internet to watch the procedings but as we got closer and closer to the actual swearing in, the bandwidth clogged up and I was not able to watch the whole thing live. I did, however, watch parts of the inauguration later in the evening on our Tivo.

You have all probably seen the one clip I will be commenting on. The clip was President Obama saying the oath of office. I have seen Barack debate on many occations and I have never really seen him flustered. Even when on The Oreily Factor he didn't seem to flinch with the barrage of questions Bill through at him, however, during his "swearning in" I could tell the Barack Obama was nervous. This should have been a time to focus and repeat the lines of the oath but he was unprepared and the Chief Justice was also a little flustered and the "Oath of Office" was botched. Here are the exact words that should have been said in the Oath of Office as stated in the Constitution.
At the bottom right it says that the new President has to take this oath.




On the next page of the Constitution, the Oath of Office is recorded. Read the first paragraph at the top left.



As I witnessed the error when taking the oath, I started to wonder if they should do it again. It stuck in my mind that if they didn't get it right, they should have started over and made sure that it was said perfectly, no mistakes. I don't know if it was just my church background getting in the way or if I was just paranoid. They seemed perfectly happy to just accept that the new president had come really close to repeating the oath and that maybe it was good enough. I am happy to announce, that Barack Obama and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. got together again and made sure that they got it right this time. Here is the story.