The 44th President of the United States

I was watching coverage of Barack Obama's inauguration while working this morning. It was hard to get much work done while doing so however. Thankfully I haven't had much to work on today. I did find it interesting that George W. Bush did not get much applause when he entered the seating area. In fact, I think he got less applause than any of the ex-presidents who were there. At least I didn't hear anyone boo him. While I was definitely a George W. Bush fan, that would have been disgraceful.

With the oath of office, perhaps Chief Justice Roberts should have had some cue cards available so he wouldn't mess up the oath of office. Yes, Obama did start repeating him before he paused, but the misplaced "faithfully" in the second phrase kind of threw of the whole rhythm of the oath even more. Then, when Roberts corrected himself and got the oath right, Obama ended up misplacing the word anyway.

I did like Obama's speech. And I wonder if his and Bush's car ride together to the capitol would have been a bit different if Bush had read Obama's speech ahead of time. In his speech though, Obama did seem to attack the principles of the Bush administration One instance of this is when he said:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

I took this to be in reference to the warant-less wiretapping that the Bush administration approved.

There was one error in his speech though. Toward the beginning, Obama said that "forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath." This is not correct. Only forty-three Americans have taken the presidential oath. While Barack Obama is indeed the forty-fourth President of the United States, Grover Cleveland was both the twenty-second and twenty-fourth President of the United States. So while he did take the oath of office twice, once for each term, he was still the same person.

Correction: In the first paragraph, I indicated that I didn't hear anyone boo Bush as he entered, however today (1/21) I found a video of that happening. Shame on those people.