Four oaths for a two-term president

A private ceremony in the Blue Room of the White House - before live television cameras but without a public audience - just before noon on Sunday is designed to be on the right side of the law as Jan 20 is the designated inauguration day in the Constitution. He will do it again Monday on the steps of the Capitol with all the pomp and ceremony watched by tens of thousands of Americans now converging on the capital.

Ronald Reagan was the last president to do the same, for his second inauguration in 1985. Before him Dwight D. Eisenhower did so in 1957.

By a strange coincidence, Obama took the oath of office twice in 2008 too. That year Jan 20 was on a Tuesday, but chief justice

John Roberts flubbed a word during the ceremony at the capitol. So he did it again at the White House a few days later by way of "an abundance of caution".

Obama would thus be only the second president to take the oath of office four times besides Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the only person to be elected president four times before the Congress set a two-term limit for the top job.

He also joins Monday not only the fraternity of 21 second-term presidents, but the even more exclusive group of seven presidents whose inaugurations have fallen on a Sunday.

Before Roosevelt's 1937 inauguration - the first one held in January - most presidents were inaugurated on March 4, the date set by an act of Continental Congress in 1788 and an act of Congress on March 1, 1792, according to The United States Capitol Historical Society.

Realising that four months was quite a long time to hand over power between administrations, the Twentieth Amendment set Jan 20 as the inauguration day.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)