Many newspapers included inaugural quizzes in their January 20th editions; the Fort Worth Star Telegram, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the Peoria Journal Star and the Los Angeles Times just to name a few. Even some non American newspapers such as Canada’s National Post got into the act. Questions such as who was the youngest or who was the oldest president on Inauguration Day were included in the quizzes that contained other questions on the topic.
It’s a pretty safe bet that Barack Obama, or as he was briefly known as around noon today, Barack Hussein Obama, started his morning by working his way through any of these various tests of knowledge of American presidential history. But, if he had, how would he have done?
Well, if his inaugural address is any indication, probably not very well. Shortly after beginning his speech, Obama said,
“Forty four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.”
Wrong!
While Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States yesterday, he was not the 44th American to have taken the oath of office. Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th president. He served from March 1885 until March 1889 after being defeated in 1888 by Benjamin Harrison. Harrison served for four years until Cleveland again won and was president from March 1893 to March 1897. He was the only person to serve two-non consecutive terms as president and has patriotic as he may have been, Grover was not “two Americans”. Barack Obama is only the 43rd American to take the presidential oath of office (and he had a lot of trouble doing that).
Obama clearly did not ad-lib his inaugural address. While it was written by his 27-year-old speechwriter Joe Favreau, described by the Financial Times as a “boy-genius”, Obama spent a lot of time in the writing of the speech. He had been sequestered for almost two days prior to the inauguration. Others, such as David Axelrod surely also not only had input in the speech but had reviewed the final draft. How a boy genius and the messiah could have overlooked the historical fact of Grover Cleveland’s unique presidential terms to conclude that Obama is the forty fourth “American” to take the oath of office is mindboggling.
So the man who doesn’t know how many other men preceeded him as president is now in charge of the most powerful country on earth and is being looked upon to keep the United States safe and get the country out of these dire economic times.
George Santayana once wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We can only wonder what Mr. Santayana would say about those who never even learned about the past in the first place.
