BAD PRECEDENTS:

Bush set to take oath for 2nd term: President is 4th in history to start new term amid war (Corbett B. Daly, 1/20/05, CBS MarketWatch)

President Bush began Thursday with a family breakfast before he was to become the sixteenth American president to take the oath of office for a second term, something his father was unable to do.

His inaugural speech, expected to last just over a quarter of an hour, will be an optimistic look at his ambitious second-term agenda of spreading democracy throughout the globe.

"America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home - the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty," Bush will say, according to excerpts of his remarks released by the White House.

The swearing-in ceremony, the first since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that changed his presidency and the nation, is scheduled to take place at noon on the western steps of the Capitol, facing the White House at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue

"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands," Bush will say.

"The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world," the president will add, addressing the issue that will define his legacy: whether he can transform Iraq from a dictatorship into a democracy.

Bush is just the fourth president to begin a second term with U.S. troops in the midst of a war, joining Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

None of whom completed that term.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 20, 2005 9:49 AM