10:12 p.m. PDT: This post has been revised with additional information from Wes Allison of the White House press pool.
Chief Justice John Roberts provided one of the few comic moments during yesterday's Inaugural ceremony, when he flubbed the President's oath of office.
It's pretty obvious that President Obama was familiar with the oath and wasn't sure if he should say it correctly or just repeat Justice Roberts. But the oath is in the Constitution, and a number of conservative pundits (and our friends at Fox News) raised questions about its legality.
So this evening, Justice Roberts met with President Obama in the White House and administered the oath again, out of "an abundance of caution," in the words of new Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
Wes Allison of the St. Petersburg Times has been filing today's official press pool reports with some fun and interesting details:
At 7:35 pm, Roberts administered the Oath of Office again to Obama in the Map Room. White House staffers present were Gibbs, White House counsel Greg Craig, senior advisor David Axelrod and a White House photographer.
Other news outlets represented in the pool were Bloomberg, Reuters and Associated Press.
Michelle Obama was not there.
Gibbs said that Craig believes the Oath was fine Tuesday, but one word was out of sequence so they did this out of a "an abundance of caution."
"We decided it was so much fun..." Obama joked while sitting on a couch.
Obama stood and walked over to make small talk with the pool as Roberts donned
his black robe.
"Are you ready to take the oath?" Roberts asked.
"I am, and we're going to do it very slowly," Obama replied.
The Oath took 25 seconds.
After a flawless recitation, Roberts smiled and said, "Congratulations, again."
Obama said, "thank you, sir."
There was a smattering of applause.
"All right," Obama said. "The bad news for the pool is there's 12 more balls."
Oaf not Oath ...at least that's how Nancy says it~!
Posted by: TINYMARIE | January 21, 2009 at 06:19 PM
I think they all need more practice, so let's have them do it again in four years! ;-)
Posted by: Linda | January 21, 2009 at 10:03 PM