President Obama Begins Second Term with Call to Act
January 21, 2013
Barack Obama took the oath of office today, inaugurating his second term as president of the United States. Speaking before hundreds of thousands of spectators on the National Mall, the president declared that the country must confront the needs of its middle class, and he acknowledged that today’s highly divisive politics are falling short in facing up to those needs: “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate. We must act; we must act knowing that our work will be imperfect.” In his speech, Obama equated current political struggles for equality with the civil rights movement of the 1950′s and 1960′s: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truth–that all of us are created equal–is the star that guides us still,” he stated. “Just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”
President Barack Obama was formally sworn in for a second term yesterday at a ceremony in the Blue Room at the White House with his wife, Michelle, and daughters, Malia and Natasha, in attendance. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office at both ceremonies. The private swearing in was carried out to satisfy the U.S. Constitution dictate that presidential terms begin on January 20.