President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., this morning.
President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., this morning.
Nicholas Kamm /AFP/Getty ImagesAs President Obama takes the oath of office again today and lays out his vision for the next four years, we're live blogging before, during and after the ceremony.
Be sure to hit your refresh button to see our latest updates. For more of NPR's live coverage, an online chat and to hear what's on the air, click here. To read related stories and get to our inaugural trivia quiz, click here.
Update at 9:10 a.m. ET. A Twitter List:
Our Social Media Desk has put together a Twitter List to collect inauguration-related tweets from NPR's correspondents and others who are out reporting today.
Update at 8:50 a.m. ET. First Family Arrives At Church:
The president, first lady Michelle Obama, their daughters Malia and Sasha and the first lady's mother â€" Marian Robinson â€" just arrived at St. John's Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Park from the White House.
Update at 8:45 a.m. ET. Crowd Is Gathering:
There were bundled-up folks heading toward the National Mall well before dawn this morning. Temperatures aren't expected to rise out of the 40s today and there will be gusty winds.
Four years ago, about 1.8 million people gathered for Obama's first inauguration. It's expected today's crowd less than half that size.
But while the crowd will be smaller, that's still a lot of people. Already, as USA Today writes, "they've filled street corners and [are in] in long snaking lines all around the Capitol and surrounding neighborhoods."
NPR's Ari Shapiro, who's out among the crowd, overheard this quip: "These hand warmers are like the stimulus. Maybe things would've been worse without them, but I can't tell."
Update at 8:35 a.m. ET. Two Terms, Four Oaths:
Obama, as NPR's Nina Totenberg tells our Newscast Desk, will be only the second person to have taken the presidential oath of office four times.
How's that?
Well, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to office four times. But Obama has had to deal with some quirky complications.
In 2009, as Nina reminds us, Obama was sworn in twice because he and Chief Justice John Roberts famously "messed up the wording" during the ceremony on the steps of the Capitol. C-SPAN has video of that odd moment here.
To quiet some of those pesky bloggers who were trying to make the case that Obama hadn't really taken the oath, he and the chief justice did it again in private the next day.
This year, Inauguration Day (Jan. 20) fell on a Sunday. Modern tradition, Nina says, calls for holding a private swearing-in on the Sunday and a public ceremony the next day. So, yesterday the president took the oath (again from Roberts) at the White House. And today they'll repeat the process in public.
So, two terms and four oaths.
