As President George W. Bush told the story of Cory Endlich, a 23-year-old from Ohio, who died in Iraq this month, his voice cracked and his chin quivered.

“Cory was an Ohio boy who wanted to join the army so badly that his dad let him start training his senior year of high school,” he told an audience in Rhode Island on Thursday according to the Financial Times.

There was no doubting the authenticity of Mr. Bush’s anguish about Sgt Endlich’s death, but the show of emotion may also have reflected the strain of what has been one of the worst weeks of his presidency.

In recent days, Mr. Bush has suffered a series of damaging setbacks that have exposed the waning influence of his increasingly unpopular and isolated administration.

As Mr. Bush was speaking in Rhode Island, Congress was in the process of dealing a fatal blow to a bipartisan immigration reform bill that the president had spent much of the past several months promoting.

What made the defeat particularly damaging was the fact it was delivered not by Democrats but by Mr. Bush’s own party.

Earlier in the week, Senator Richard Lugar, senior Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee, became the most senior member of his party to call for the start of US withdrawal from Iraq, giving voice to growing unrest among Republicans about the war.

Read the rest here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0acf710c-2668-11dc-8e18-000b5df10621.html