"WE'RE NOT INTERESTED IN THE POSSIBLE" (profanity alert):

Obama's first chance to test-drive his new approach was the speech he delivered to a joint session of Congress soon after returning from the Vineyard. The address was intended to plump for a jobs bill designed, at the president's specific instruction, without regard for its chances of passage. "I want to put forward what I think the right thing to do is," Obama told his team. "I don't want this to be a legislative compromise. We're not going to negotiate with ourselves. We're not interested in the possible but in what should be."

For Obama, the speech proved to be a turning point, politically and personally. "From that moment on, there's been a sense of liberation about him," says a confidant of the president. "He'd had enough."

A cynic might say that the liberation Obama feels is the freedom from, you know, actually governing. 

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