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Obama Takes the Oath With Little Fanfare, a Day Early Obama Sworn In for 2nd Term, This Time Quietly
(about 2 hours later)
WASHINGTON — With only his family beside him, President Barack Hussein Obama was sworn into office in the White House before noon on Sunday in advance of Monday’s public pomp, starting a second term with a bitterly divided government at home and persistent threats abroad that inhibit his effort to redefine America’s use of power around the world. WASHINGTON — With only his family beside him, Barack Hussein Obama was sworn into office for a second term on Sunday in advance of Monday’s public pomp, facing a bitterly divided government at home and persistent threats abroad that inhibit his effort to redefine America’s use of power.
It was a brief and intimate moment in the White House, made necessary by a quirk of the constitutional calendar but setting the tone for an inauguration on Monday that will be less of a spectacle than four years ago, when the nation’s first black president embodied hope and change for most Americans at a time of economic crisis and war. It was a brief and intimate moment in the White House, made necessary by a quirk of the calendar that placed the constitutionally mandated start of the new term on a Sunday.
For Monday’s festivities, with the traditional inaugural parade, balls and not least the re-enacted swearing in outside the Capitol, there will be fewer parties, and fewer people swarming the National Mall; organizers expect less than half of the 1.8 million people who flocked to the city last time. But it also seemed to capture tempered expectations after four years of economic troubles and near-constant partisan confrontation. It presaged a formal inauguration on Monday that will be less of a spectacle than the first one, when the nation’s first black president embodied hope and change for many Americans at a time of financial struggle and war.
The private but official swearing-in of Mr. Obama, 51, was just the seventh such event in history to be held before the public ceremony, and the first since Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural, each one occurring because the constitutionally mandated date for the inauguration fell on a Sunday. Recorded and televised minutes later, the simple scene suggested a couple marrying before a justice of the peace, with a big ceremony and party planned for later. For Monday’s festivities, with the traditional parade, balls and not least the re-enacted swearing-in outside the Capitol, there will be fewer parties and fewer people swarming the National Mall; organizers expect fewer than half the 1.8 million people who flocked to the city last time.
Only Michelle Obama, holding her family Bible, and the couple’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, stood beside Mr. Obama, in the grand Blue Room as he recited the oath specified in the Constitution and again administered to him by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Mr. Obama’s second-term challenges are formidable. The economy, while recovering steadily, remains fragile. The unemployment rate is as high as it was in January 2009, though it is down from the 10 percent peak reached late that year.
The chief justice administered the oath faithfully and Mr. Obama repeated it accurately, unlike four years earlier, when Mr. Roberts inverted a few words during the public swearing-in, Mr. Obama echoed the errors, and the oath had to be repeated in private later. The chief justice, who had relied on his famously prodigious memory in 2009, this time took no chances: He read the oath from a printed text. There is no consensus with Republicans about additional stimulus measures — or virtually anything else, including Mr. Obama’s second-term priorities for addressing the national debt, illegal immigration and gun violence. And as the terrorist attack in Algeria last week illustrated, Mr. Obama continues to confront threats around the globe, both from state actors like Iran and North Korea and from Qaeda-inspired extremists seeking to exploit power vacuums in the Mideast and across Africa and Asia.
After they finished, Justice Roberts congratulated Mr. Obama, who thanked him twice as the two shook hands. Mr. Obama next embraced his wife and daughters in turn. His younger daughter, Sasha, said, “Good job, Daddy,” and he replied “I did it!” only to have her joke, in reference to the problem four years earlier, “You didn’t mess up.” Mr. Obama laughed as he turned to the pool of reporters and about a dozen relatives, saying, “Thank you, everybody” before exiting the room. At home, the emphasis is on reducing the deficits that piled up because of the economic downturn and the soaring costs of caring for an aging population. Yet Mr. Obama and Republicans in Congress, divided by opposing views on the role of government, are no closer to a budget agreement that would overhaul taxes and costly, fast-growing entitlement programs like Medicare. The next showdown in what has seemed a never-ending loop of fiscal brinkmanship and half-measures is likely to come as soon as next month over spending cuts.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was sworn in earlier at his residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, using the same 19th-century family Bible he has used in every swearing-in ceremony since he entered the Senate in 1973. The persistent partisan battles underscore Mr. Obama’s inability to make good on an original promise — that he would open a bipartisan era of problem solving. While Mr. Obama’s words have become less soaring and more confrontational toward Republicans after four years in which they sought to foil him, David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said on the CNN program “State of the Union” on Sunday that the president had written a “hopeful” inaugural address for Monday’s ceremony.
At Mr. Biden’s request, the oath was delivered by Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. He was surrounded by family members, including his wife, Jill. But Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said on the same program, “The president seems so fixated on demonizing Republicans that he is blinded to the opportunities as well as the obligations that he has to deal with the big problems of this country on debt and the entitlements.”
Afterward, Mr. Biden shook the justice’s hand, turned to a large audience of family, friends and close political associates, and expressed his warm thanks. Justice Sotomayor, he noted, was due in New York and had a car waiting to take her to Union Station. “Madame Justice, it’s been an honor, a great honor,” he said. Mr. Obama draws approval from just over half of Americans — down 11 percentage points from his pre-inaugural popularity in a New York Times/CBS News survey four years ago — with Republicans united in opposition and independents split. If history is a guide, he has a limited time to act before his post-election leverage fades.
Mr. Biden then left for Arlington National Cemetery, where he joined President Obama in laying a wreath before the Tomb of the Unknowns. The official swearing-in of Mr. Obama, 51, was just the seventh time in history that a president was sworn in privately before the public ceremony, and the first since President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration. Each instance since 1821 occurred because the constitutionally mandated date for the inauguration fell on a Sunday.
The president and his family later traveled to Washington to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, an historic church with a long record of activism against racism — it once harbored runaway slaves — to worship and to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The federal holiday honoring Dr. King coincides this year with Inauguration Day. The simplicity of Mr. Obama’s minute-long taking of the oath of office, recorded and immediately televised, suggested a marriage before a justice of the peace, with a big ceremony and party planned for later.
The congregation was enthusiastic, according to pool reports, and the sermon ended with a boisterous call and response of “Forward” – the president’s one-word campaign slogan. Only Michelle Obama, holding her family Bible for the ceremony, and the Obamas’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, stood beside Mr. Obama in the grand Blue Room as he recited the 35-word oath in the Constitution that was administered, as it was four years ago, by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. About a dozen relatives of the Obamas and Jane Roberts, the justice’s wife, watched out of camera range.
These events took place mostly out of view of the hundreds of thousands of Americans, foreign visitors and dignitaries who have poured into Washington to be a part of the second inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president, a more restrained affair than four years ago but still a resonant marker in the nation’s history. By contrast, the swearing-in hours earlier of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at the vice-presidential mansion, while simple, was large enough to suggest that Mr. Biden is indeed looking beyond the next four years to the 2016 election. Among the 120 guests who watched Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor swear-in Mr. Biden were Democratic dignitaries from the early presidential-nominating states, including Gov. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. On Saturday evening, Mr. Biden attended a party of Democrats from Iowa, the first presidential caucus state.
The oaths mark not only the official start of the second Obama-Biden term but also a certain demarcation between the challenges of the first term — winding down two wars, dealing with an economic recession, passage of landmark health care legislation amid fierce partisan wrangling — and the typically more modest agenda of a second-term president. The private ceremonies were held because, under the Constitution, the two men’s first terms ended at noon on Sunday. In between their events, Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden went together to Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. And they prayed separately: the Obamas attended services at the 175-year-old Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the enthusiastic congregation engaged in a call-and-response with the pastor evoking the president’s “Forward” campaign slogan; the Bidens and their guests celebrated a Mass in the vice-presidential mansion.
Mr. Obama, whose hair has visibly grayed over the past four years, has certain advantages as he looks ahead to an agenda expected to include immigration overhaul, a push for gun control, efforts to speed the economic recovery and an end to the war in Afghanistan. For Mr. Obama, the solemnity of his swearing-in was broken by his younger daughter, Sasha, who seemed to recall the problem four years earlier, when a garbling of the oath by both her father and Justice Roberts at the Capitol forced them to repeat the process at the White House the next day.
Polls show he has the cautious support of at least a bare majority of Americans, though recent surveys also confirm the nation’s persistently sharp partisan divide. With warmth that belied their political differences, especially over campaign spending law, Justice Roberts congratulated Mr. Obama, and the president thanked him twice as they shook hands. Mr. Obama then embraced his wife and daughters in turn. “Good job, Daddy,” Sasha said. “I did it!” he replied, only to have her quip, “You didn’t mess up” — leaving the president chuckling and rolling his eyes as he pivoted to thank the small group of witnesses and exit the room.
A stock market that lost hundreds of points on the eve of his first term has rallied, despite an otherwise tepid recovery. The debt crisis in Europe appears to have subsided for now, but other enormous foreign-policy challenges loom: in North Korea, Iran, across the Middle East and most recently in North Africa. Elsewhere on a sunny winter Sunday, the streets of Washington were snarled with traffic, and hotels and homes were filling with the tens of thousands of visitors who, along with area residents, began partying through the weekend in bars and at receptions hosted by corporations and political groups.
Still, across Washington, the mood was festive on Sunday as final preparations for the events of Monday, from morning prayers to glamorous balls, parties and candlelight celebrations in the evening, were completed. Democratic women especially were feted. Google, Elle Magazine and the left-leaning Center for American Progress sponsored a brunch at the National Portrait Gallery, featuring newly elected Democrats like New Hampshire’s governor. At a party sponsored by Emily’s List, which helps elect Democratic women who favor abortion rights, the talk was of 2016 — and whether Hillary Rodham Clinton, the outgoing secretary of state, might run for president.
Flags have sprouted on official Washington facades, bunting adorns banks and luxury hotels, tall metal barriers and cumbersome concrete ones are in place to block or divert traffic, and the gleaming white presidential reviewing stand, with its bulletproof windows and steeply sloped roof, awaits the arrival of the official parade on Monday. Flags, bunting and red, white and blue lights festooned streets, buildings and grounds, but as usual for such events, also ubiquitous were cement and metal security barriers along with police and troops on downtown blocks.
A crowd of up to 800,000 is expected to assemble Monday on the National Mall for the inaugural festivities, while millions more watch on television from afar. Much is changed since January 2009, and much of it not in the way Mr. Obama planned. His challenges ahead are perhaps not so great as then — 779,000 people lost their jobs that January, a one-month record, the financial and auto industries were teetering and millions of Americans were losing homes and savings — but they are nonetheless daunting.
On Sunday, when Mr. Obama repeated the oath, swearing to faithfully execute the office of president and “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he placed his hand on a Bible that Mrs. Obama’s father, Fraser Robinson III, gave to his own mother, LaVaughn Delores Robinson, in 1958. While Democrats controlled Congress for his first two years, when Mr. Obama passed his signature laws for economic stimulus, expanded health insurance and financial industry regulation, Republicans captured the House majority in a conservative backlash at his midterm and are expected to keep it for his second term, given their success in drawing districts to keep them safe for Republicans. That means Mr. Obama’s other priorities for a second term — chiefly addressing illegal immigration and gun violence — likewise will hardly come easy, if at all.
The Blue Room, with its royal blue and gold carpet and French Empire-style ornamentation, has long been used for White House receptions. President Grover Cleveland married his much younger bride, Frances Folsom, there on June 2, 1886, as John Philip Sousa led the Marine Band in a rendition of the Wedding March from a nearby hall. James Monroe sipped tea there with Great Plains Indian leaders. The main White House Christmas tree graces the room each year.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.

In recent weeks, White House officials, apparently hoping to keep the public focus on Monday’s ceremonies, had hinted that reporters would be excluded from the swearing-in on Sunday. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
There is precedent for that approach: When Inauguration Day fell on a Sunday in 1877, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite administered the oath to Rutherford B. Hayes in the Red Room with no one else present; the private swearing-in had come as a complete surprise to the public, with a news report at the time saying it had remained a “profound secret.”
This year, the White House ultimately decided to allow a small pool of reporters and a network television camera crew record the event.
But there was not much to record; the president was saving his speechmaking for Monday, when he is expected to deliver an Inaugural Address of about 20 minutes from the western steps of the Capitol. One of his senior advisers, David Plouffe, said Sunday on the ABC program “This Week” that while Mr. Obama would lay out his vision for a second term on Monday, “the detailed blueprint and ideas will be in the State of the Union” address, on Feb. 12.
The four swearings-in for Mr. Obama, including the one to come on Monday, might seem to place him in rare historic company — along with the only four-term president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. But he is not the only president to have been privately sworn in on the morning of Inauguration Day to ensure a smooth transition.
Two other presidents did so because Jan. 20 fell on a Sunday, according to the White House Historical Association: Ronald Reagan in 1985 (which was just as well: frigid weather forced the cancellation of the next day’s inaugural parade, and the swearing-in was moved to the Capitol Rotunda), Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957 (the president and Vice President Richard M. Nixon were sworn in back to back in the East Room; Nixon’s young daughter Julie had a black eye from a sledding accident)
There were other times the normal Inauguration Day fell on a Sunday, but they were before 1933, when the ratification of the 20th Amendment changed the mandated inaugural date to Jan. 20 from March 4.
The first time Inauguration Day fell on a Sunday, in 1821, James Monroe consulted with Chief Justice John Marshall and decided to simply postpone the ceremony a day. Twenty-eight years later, Zachary Taylor did the same, though some at the time questioned who in fact was president during the one-day gap.
But in 1877, Hayes, after consultation with Chief Justice Waite and others, decided to take the oath privately a day early. They had concluded, as an Associated Press report said at the time, that “such a course was advisable, though it was not anticipated that any exigency would arise under which, in case there was an interregnum in the Executive Office, the peace of the country would be imperiled.”
Woodrow Wilson was also sworn early in 1917. Edith Bolling Wilson, a first lady not always treated gently in the press, later wrote that she and her husband found the simple ceremony “more to our taste than the formal Inauguration, which followed on Monday.”
It was in keeping with that tradition of ensuring a smooth transition that the events of Sunday were unfurling.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 20, 2013Correction: January 20, 2013

A previous version of this article misstated the month that Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated. It was March, not January.

An earlier version of this article misstated the month that Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated. It was March, not January.