Although it had been billed as one of the most important speeches of his presidency, there were few signs on Wednesday that George W. Bush’s State of the Union address had succeeded in stemming the rapid haemorrhaging of his authority.

A number of leading Democrats, including Barack Obama, a front-runner for the 2008 presidential campaign, evinced cautious welcomes for Mr Bush’s modest proposals to address global warming and healthcare reform.

But most Democrats and several prominent Republicans remained fixed on Mr Bush’s unwillingness to listen to his growing army of critics over the war in Iraq, to which he devoted about a quarter of the 50-minute speech on Tuesday night...

In contrast to his six previous State of the Union addresses, Mr Bush appealed to Congress, which turned Democrat last November for the first time in his presidency, to work “across the aisle” in a bipartisan way in order to “achieve big things for the American people”. But the already-weak prospects for a fruitful White House legislative agenda over the next 18 months appear only to have waned further.

“If you want to see bold bipartisan action between now and 2008 you should look to America’s democratic laboratories at the state level where states like California and Massachusetts are showing the way on issues like healthcare and global warming,” said Ted Halstead, president of... the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank in Washington...

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