Obama makes mistake about the Declaration of Independence

This seems like a fairly obvious mistake and one would have hoped that a speech writer would have picked this up.  The full speech is available from the White House website:

all in defense of those God-given rights that were first put to paper 236 years ago: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . . .

Of course, Thomas Jefferson didn't think that this was the first time that these ideas were "put to paper."  The Declaration reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."


CNS News notes:

"This was the object of the Declaration of Independence," Jefferson wrote in a letter to Henry Lee on May 8, 1825. "Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.
"Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion," Jefferson told Lee. "All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c."