President George W. Bush is a man who gives himself away with his body language more than his actual language. As he delivered his annual State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, Mr Bush stood flanked by his vice president, Dick Cheney, and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, giving a speech that elicited only tepid applause from both Democrats and Republicans alike.

Mr Bush showed a few glimmers of relief at the end as he signed autographs, but in a sign of his diminished presidency, his biggest applause lines came not from his policy prescriptions but his homage to two American heroes in the crowd including Wesley Autrey, a New Yorker who jumped onto subway tracks to save a man who had fallen after suffering a seizure and Tommy Reisman, a Kentuckian from the aptly named town of Independence, who used his body as a shield to protect his fellow troops in Iraq.