Certainly watching Chief Justice John Roberts and President Barack Obama bungle the oath of office yesterday during the inauguration was painful to watch.  It was very disappointing to see them flub a rather solemn and important moment in history.  Interestingly enough, tonight it was announced that because President Obama did not say the oath exactly as specified in the Constitution, he actually was re-sworn in later last evening. 

From the UK Times:

Some constitutional scholars had voiced fears earlier in the day that the botched oath meant that Mr. Obama might still be a junior Senator from Illinois, with the real President of the United States being Joe Biden, his running mate.

“We believe that the oath of office was administered effectively and that the president was sworn in appropriately yesterday,” said Greg Craig, the White House Counsel.

“But the oath appears in the constitution itself. And out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice [John} Roberts administered the oath a second time,” said White House Counsel Greg Craig in a statement early Wednesday night.

Fortunately for Mr. Obama he is not the first president to have retaken his oath: Calvin Coolidge and Chester Arthur did it before him, and some believe that Herbert Hoover should have done the same.

The inauguration, take two, was carried out at 7.35pm in the map room of the White House, with Mr Roberts—a conservative, whose nomination Mr Obama had opposed—again donning his black robe.

…….

Americans had woken up with a collective “Doh!” yesterday when constitutional scholars began to question the validity of Mr Obama’s oath. One of them, Jack Beermann, of Boston University, went so far as to suggest that it was “an open question” as to whether Mr Obama was in fact the leader of the free world—a position from which he later backed down. “If you were a real stickler you would say that he shouldn’t begin to execute his presidential duties until he’s taken the oath again,” he told The Times.

There were two primary reasons for the concern over Mr. Obama’s oath on Tuesday.

The first is that under Amendment 20 of the US Constitution, ratified in 1933, the term of the outgoing president ends at precisely noon on January 20 (it is vague as to when the new president’s term begins).

Because of a time over-run during Tuesday’s lavish inaugural proceedings, the world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma was still performing John Williams’ Air and Simple Gifts at noon, meaning that for the remaining five minutes of the musical interlude, America’s new Commander in Chief might have technically been Joe Biden, who had been sworn in earlier at 11.57am.

The more serious concern was related to the fact that when Mr Obama finally recited the oath of office at 12.05pm, he got the words in the wrong order. The blame for this seems to lie with both Mr Obama and Mr Roberts, who read out of the 35-word oath from memory.

I find the backstory quite interesting! 

The Times:  Doh! President Obama retakes his oath