The situation in Iraq has damaged an increasingly isolated president, writes Denis Stauntonfrom Washington.
The loudest applause during US president George Bush's State of the Union address on Tuesday came when the president referred to Wesley Autrey, an African-American construction worker sitting beside the First Lady. Three weeks ago in Harlem, Autrey saw a man fall on to the subway tracks, leapt down to get him, and held the man in a space between the rails as a train roared over them.
Unfortunately for Mr Bush, there is no such modest hero available to save his presidency and Tuesday's speech was the president's last-ditch effort to remain relevant in a new and hostile political landscape.
The president devoted the first half of his speech to domestic issues, identifying four big issues on which both he and the Democratic majority in Congress want action - education, energy, healthcare and immigration.
Mr Bush had little new to say on education and energy and environmental groups dismissed as vague and inadequate his proposals to reduce petrol consumption. On the day that former vice-president Al Gore won an Academy Award nomination for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the president made a glancing reference to climate change but stopped short of proposing statutory limits to greenhouse gas emissions.
The president's plan for making healthcare affordable to more Americans is to tax citizens who have an employer-funded healthcare plan while offering tax breaks to those who take out private insurance. Democrats dismissed the proposal as "warmed-over soup" that would have the effect of crippling employer-based health plans by saddling them with older and sicker people, while the young and healthy opt to go private.
The most promising area of co-operation with Democrats is immigration reform, with the president, unlike most Republicans, favouring a plan that would allow most illegal immigrants to remain in the US and eventually apply for citizenship. Senate Democrats want to pass a reform bill by August, a realistic goal if enough Republicans cross the aisle to support it.
The second half of the speech focused on foreign policy and Mr Bush asked Congress to give his plan to send more troops to Iraq a chance to succeed.
"This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we're in. Every one of us wishes this war were over and won. Yet it would not be like us to leave our promises unkept, our friends abandoned, and our own security at risk," he said.
Mr Bush was able to rattle through his remarks on Iraq with few interruptions for applause, as almost all Democrats and many Republicans listened in silence.
In the official Democratic response to the speech, Virginia senator Jim Webb summed up the status of the president's Iraq policy.
"The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military," he said.
A Vietnam veteran whose son is now serving in Iraq, Mr Webb retains the blunt, guileless manner of his Ulster-Scots forbears. Using language seldom used by either Democrats or Republicans, he spoke of class divisions driven by an accelerating economic inequality that sees the average chief executive earning 400 times the salary of the average worker.
"Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world. Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts. Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them. In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table. Our workers know this, through painful experience. Our white-collar professionals are beginning to understand it, as their jobs start disappearing also," he said.
Mr Webb invoked two earlier Republican presidents, praising Theodore Roosevelt for confronting the robber barons of the early 20th century and Dwight Eisenhower for ending the Korean War in the 1950s.
"These presidents took the right kind of action, for the benefit of the American people and for the health of our relations around the world. Tonight we are calling on this president to take similar action, in both areas. If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way," he said.
Mr Webb's words represent a challenge, not only to Mr Bush but to the Democratic majority in Congress to take bold and urgent action to end the war in Iraq.
This week, senators will discuss a number of non-binding resolutions condemning the plan to send more than 20,000 new troops to Iraq.
There is little agreement, however, on the next step after Mr Bush ignores a non-binding resolution. Congress has the authority to cut off funds for the war, the step that ended the Vietnam War three decades ago. Democrats, particularly those with presidential ambitions in 2008, are reluctant to take that step, fearful that they will be accused of abandoning the troops in the field.
Gen David Petraeus, nominated to be the new US commander in Iraq, acknowledged this week that the strategy for improving security in Baghdad would increase the risk to US forces.
If US military casualties increase dramatically over the next few months without clear evidence of political progress in Iraq, public opinion could push Democrats into a leadership role left empty by an increasingly friendless president.