While the clouds of economic crisis and war that hovered over his first inauguration has vanished to a large extent, the mood of optimism and hope that infused his 2009 inauguration was missing to a large extent.
While last time, there were an estimated 1.8 million onlookers, the crowd today hovered around a mark of about 600,000.
His historic ascendancy to the White House in 2008 came with soaring public hopes and expectations for a new kind of governance that would close the vast partisan gulf developed in recent decades.
The president and his wife Michelle Obama started the day at a church service at St. John's Episcopal Church, just across Lafayette Square from the White House. Vice President Joseph Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, joined the first couple at the service.
