President Clinton is supposed to be the most powerful leader in the world, but he has just learned a lesson about power from his mutinous Democratic troops.
The President wants to be able to negotiate new trade agreements. This is part of his job as chief executive. He and his administration conduct the negotiations, but Congress has to approve the results. That is the way it has been since the Kennedy round of tariff-cutting back in the 1960s. But no other country is going to spend years negotiating a trade agreement with the US if Congress can then unpick it and look for amendments before it will pass it.
That is why Mr Clinton wanted the "fast-track" authority which other presidents had. This means that any trade agreement he signs can only be voted up or down by Congress - no amendments.
Last week he asked Congress for this fast-track authority and was slapped down. For a president who has repeatedly said that getting this authority is a priority of his second term and who sees economic "globalisation" playing a key role in his foreign policy, this was a humiliation. But even more dismaying for him was that the rejection came from his own Democrats in the House of Representatives, where most but not all Republicans supported the President on this issue.
Of the 205 House Democrats, only 44, or 22 per cent, were prepared to support the President's request. This was after a weekend of frenzied lobbying on Capitol Hill by White House aides who were promising the sun, moon and stars for votes while the President worked the phones into the small hours of Sunday morning.
Faced with the prospect of defeat, the White House withdrew the Bill for fast-track authority. Another attempt will be made next year, perhaps with a truncated version.
But the sight of a US President being rebuffed by his own Congress sends a dismaying signal to America's trade partners. If he cannot get his own party to back him on trade what is the point of negotiating with America?
Domestically, the President is also damaged and already the "lame-duck" tag is being flung around. Last Sunday morning in the early hours, Mr Clinton became "a President without a party," wrote one commentator.
Why have the Democrats rebuffed their President exactly a year after he was swept back into office? The answer to that question may have more to do with next year's mid-term elections than international trade.
Mr Clinton's relationship with his party has been cool, especially since he took the advice of political consultant, Dick Morris, and tried to govern from a point somewhere between the Democrats and the Republicans. "Triangulation", the later-disgraced Morris called this strategy. It required the President to move to the centre and steal the Republicans' clothes on welfare reform, balanced budget, taxes and family values.
Even before this, Mr Clinton was re-inventing his party to become "New Democrats" who had shaken off the old tax-and-spend image of the pre-Clinton Democrats he had called "intellectually bankrupt". The once prized "liberal" label linking Democrats back to their hero figure, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, has become a dirty word with the Clintonites who can point to their success of two terms in the White House, the first time the Democrats have won this since 1936.
But the once spurned "liberals" have had enough of being patronised and regarded as prehistoric. The President's humiliation over trade was engineered by an alliance between the Democratic leader in the House, Dick Gephardt, and the powerful labour confederation, the AFLCIO, who identify free trade agreements such as NAFTA with US jobs being exported to Mexico and other low wage countries.
Mr Gephardt is running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2000. The favourite is still the Vice-President, Al Gore, but if he is too identified with a President who no longer commands the loyalty of his party can he win the nomination?
Perhaps too much can be read into the fast-track rout. House Democrats wanted to teach the President a lesson after he slighted them while he did budget and other deals with Republicans. But they also want to persuade him to show more enthusiasm for traditional policies which would help the Democrats to win back control of the House next November.
In his re-election campaign last year the President distanced himself from the parallel Congressional battle as part of his "triangulation" strategy. He won but Democrats lost the struggle to win back the House. Now Mr Clinton faces no more elections and can be expected to try and mend fences with the labour movement as well as his own party. But if he wants fast track, he will have to listen more closely to to the concerns of the "liberals" and the blue-collar workers who are still the Democratic core vote. As Congressman Barney Frank puts it: "We're in a bargaining situation . . . we're willing to hold globalisation hostage to equity."
In a week in which Mr Clinton as Commander-in-Chief deploys fearsome weapons around the Gulf region, being the most powerful man in the world is not all it seems.