As far as I could tell, President Obama gave his speech with almost perfect delivery. It is unfortunate, then, that he could have made such a mistake right at the beginning.

While President Obama is our nation's 44th elected President, he is only the 43rd person to take the office!!

While it may be easy for most to forget, President Grover Cleveland was our nation's 22nd and 24th President, with President Benjamin Harrison presiding inbetween terms as our nations 23rd.

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One of the issues that people who oppose Barack Obama's election to president like to trot out is the issue of his experience.  I plan to take on the qualitative argument in a future diary, but first, let's put away the exceptionally silly historical quantitative argument based on age, number of years in office, and tenure at different levels of office.

Only three men in the history of the United States, Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and Franklin Roosevelt, have won the popular vote in three elections.  Two of these men, Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland, failed to achieve a majority of the votes in the Electoral College in one of their three popular victories, and therefore served only two terms as president even though they won three popular elections.

A number of people have proposed that Barack Obama's years of experience in elected office are not suitable to election to the presidency.

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