After six years in which a Republican speaker led the applause for all the president's initiatives and protected him from most efforts at congressional oversight, here was a clear sign that the seventh year of the Bush presidency is going to be quite different. Now, with Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco in the chair and the opposition party in control, Congress is going to be a much less hospitable place for the administration and its proposals.

That new political reality is a big part of the reason why no one expects much to come out of the measures pushed in the president's address. But it is not the only reason. Even if Republicans had retained control of the Congress, Bush would still be saddled with an increasingly unpopular war and would still be suffering from historically low public approval.

“He is clearly in a very weakened state,” said George C. Edwards III, a presidential scholar at the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University. “People don't have confidence in him; they don't have confidence in his truthfulness or in his competence. And that is a very weak position from which to try to exercise leadership.”

The president betrayed no signs of this weakness during this address, though. He was confident in delivery, gracious in saluting Pelosi as the first female speaker, firm in pledging perseverance, and uncharacteristically candid about what a terrible year had just passed for American interests in the Middle East.

Gone for the night was the Texas swagger so evident in prior speeches, along with the visionary talk from last year's address in which he called for “the end of tyranny in our world.”

“The delivery was smooth with lots of grace notes,” said Bruce Buchanan, a professor at the University of Texas and longtime observer of Bush. “He did what he could rhetorically. But words alone probably won't solve the problems.”

Not even the best presidential rhetoric could obscure the fact that the state of the Bush presidency and – most important – the state of the Iraq war both worsened in the 12 months since the president's address last year. The contrast between the speeches is sharp.

Last year, Bush spoke of “dramatic progress” in Iraq, held out hope of imminent troop withdrawals and declared “we are winning.” This year, he admitted “we have been sobered,” spoke of “a tragic escalation” in violence, and asked the country to give his planned surge in troop levels “a chance to work.”

Last year, he had his eye on the upcoming midterm election and appealed to his party's conservative base. This year, he recognized the election went poorly for him, shifted his aim across the aisle to the new Democratic majority and appealed for bipartisanship.

“He is working very hard to try to set the agenda,” Edwards said. “It's difficult, but if he's going to accomplish anything in the next two years in terms of policy changes on issues other than the war, he had to start here.”

One of the president's problems is that the American people have firmly set views on him now that he is in his second term. “Most of the public has tuned him out,” Buchanan said. “All he can do is plead to give his new policy (in Iraq) a chance.”

With this speech, Bush needed to try to buy some time for Iraq, while laying the groundwork for possible deals with the Democrats on other issues, Buchanan said.

Bush will find it difficult to work out those deals, according to William A. Galston, who helped craft President Clinton's State of the Union address that gave him a boost after the Democrats lost control of Congress after the 1994 midterm election.

“It remains to be seen how much of the rest of the speech the American people are really going to take seriously if they believe the president has ignored their judgment on a matter as important as war and peace,” Galston said

Wayne Fields, a Washington University professor, who is an expert on State of the Union addresses, said one speech cannot be expected to resolve all these issues. But he said few speeches in the Bush presidency came at a more crucial time.

“This is the push-comes-to-shove moment, and you can't dig yourself out using one speech as a shovel,” Fields said. “But I think the fact that the country is so concerned, so confused, made this a terrifically important moment.”