the oath of office

NPR once had a feature with a bunch of other country's Presidential oaths, and they were all pretty lame. "I promise to be good," that sort of thing. Only the US oath had any real gravity, because the US President promises to do something concrete and of the highest importance: preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Bush broke his oath. My highest hope for Obama is that he will keep his.

In his inaugural address, he hinted that he intends to:

. . .we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.