A WELL-EARNED SERENITY:

[F]or better and worse, Obama has been the Serenity Prayer president.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

Courage to change the things I can

And wisdom to know the difference. [Serenity Prayer]

This is our president. He accepts the things he cannot change, and tries to change the things he believes he can. In political rather than spiritual terms, Obama's presidency has seemingly toggled between resignation and targeted, bold strikes.

Rewind to January 2010, when Scott Brown, a little-known Massachusetts Republican, won a special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy -- robbing Obama of his 60-seat supermajority in the Senate. Though counseled to moderate his healthcare reform proposal, Obama famously told aides "I feel lucky" and committed to an aggressive plan to push through a portion of the bill under Senate budget-reconciliation rules, thereby avoiding a Republican filibuster. Senior strategist David Axelrod recalled Obama's thinking thusly: "I get the politics of this, but if we don't do this now, it probably wouldn't happen ... Are we going to put our approval rating on the shelf and admire it for eight years, or are we here to spend our political capital and try and do things of lasting importance for the country?"

The Serenity Prayer famously asks for wisdom to know the difference between changeable and unchangeable situations. On healthcare, wisely or not, Obama boldly chose to push for change. He succeeded. And he paid the price.

After the disastrous 2010 congressional midterm elections, Obama, reflecting on his party's "shellacking," predicted his relationship with the public would "have some more ups and downs." Obama then, quietly and improbably, reached one of the few compromises he would ever reach with congressional Republicans: a deal to extend Bush-era tax rates for two years paired with a package of unemployment benefits and tax incentives for businesses. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer decried the compromise bill as "Stimulus II," a deficit-financed "free lunch": "[T]he package will add as much as 1 percent to GDP and lower the unemployment rate by about 1.5 percentage points. That could easily be the difference between victory and defeat in 2012...

The U.S. economy grew 3.5% in the third quarter -- July to September -- compared to the same time a year ago, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

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