The President is no friend of the press. George W. Bush, notorious for linguistic gaffes and muddled logic, doesn't like spontaneous questions, and he gives fewer press conferences than most of his predecessors.

Whenever he does appear before the White House press corps, the dramatics have already been worked out to the smallest detail, even though Bush likes to give the impression of camaraderie by using journalists' first names ("Your turn, John").

This made the request that US broadcast network NBC received last week all the more unusual. The President, according to the request, wanted to appear on the Sunday program "Meet the Press." Of all people, George W. Bush had chosen Tim Russert, the intellectual grand inquisitor who moderates the weekend's best political talk show, to deliver a message to his fellow Americans: I am still here, and I am still in control.

The public relations offensive is necessary. In recent weeks, the man in charge at the White House has lost a great deal of his reputation and support.

His last victory, the capture of Saddam Hussein, was quickly forgotten. The carefully staged State of the Union address on Capitol Hill proved to be a propaganda flop, and even fellow Republicans criticized the Bush budget proposal for 2005 presented last Monday as an irresponsible "fantasy budget." It gets even worse: According to a Gallup poll conducted last week, the sitting president had fallen behind John F. Kerry, the current favorite of the Democratic Party, by a margin of 46 to 53 percent. And the election is only nine months away.

John Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts, celebrated his biggest victory to date in last Tuesday's primary elections. He is emerging as a competitor who, thanks to his heroic record as a Vietnam veteran, could truly pose a threat to George W. Bush. And it was precisely in this unfortunate week that the troublesome issue of the war in Iraq landed on Bush' desk once again.

It was not just anyone, but CIA Director George Tenet, a confidant of the president, who addressed the public last Thursday at Washington's Georgetown University and bluntly exposed the propagandistic trickery with which commander-in-chief George W. Bush led the American nation into the Iraq war.

The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), chief coordinator of all US intelligence services, took matters into his own hands when it became clear that his people - and, most of all, Tenet himself - were about to be blamed for the US' costly military adventure.

The hunt had been triggered by David Kay. The former head of the Iraq Survey Group quit his job out of frustration, because his 1,400 specialists had been unable to find any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Kay told a group of surprised senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iraq had probably not had such weapons for years.

"It looks as though we were all wrong, and that is most disturbing," complained the man who, as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq after 1991, was apparently far more effective in bringing about disarmament than Washington would like to admit. According to Kay, however, George W. Bush did not knowingly mislead the American people; instead, the intelligence services "misused" him.

The beleaguered Tenet fought back. He dutifully absolved his president of responsibility, claiming that the war was justified and, furthermore, that no one had coerced the CIA into doctoring its analyses to support a military campaign which, according to revelations by the administration's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, had been planned ever since Bush came into office in January 2001.

"Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful - or thoughtful - discussion of intelligence these days," the DCI complained, passing the buck on to someone else. "Our analysts were certainly of different opinions on many important aspects of this weapons program, and we believe that this debate was clearly expressed." They "never claimed that there was acute danger."

One person, in particular, is now feeling exposed: Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was first considered a voice of reason until, in late 2002, he transformed himself into the spokesman of the hawks. In a dramatic appearance on February 5, 2003, the retired general attempted to force the UN Security Council to approve military action just six weeks before the attack on Iraq. Powell had spent days at CIA headquarters collecting top-secret information to "report what the United States knows about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

"Any statement that I issue today is based upon sources, solid sources. These are not simply claims," Powell assured the council, and then proceeded to serve up one lie after the next. He told the Security Council that the "deadly weapons programs" were a "real and present danger" and that the United States had "first-hand descriptions of mobile biological weapons laboratories."

In contrast, Kay now says: "We found information that led to entirely different conclusions." Like the UN inspectors before him, he too concludes that defectors "said what we wanted them to say." The mobile laboratories were apparently used for a highly mundane purpose: to deliver hydrogen for weather balloons.

"Saddam Hussein has never accounted for 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents," Powell said. Today Kay says: "There is no indication that these warheads were ever filled."

By now, almost every one of Powell's claims based on CIA information has been refuted. No wonder that Powell, to the dismay of the White House, has now come to the conclusion that his decision on the war might have been different today: "The absence of weapons of mass destruction changes the political calculation."

But if the calculation was wrong, then only one person is responsible - not Tenet, not Powell, but George W. Bush.

It is this debate over responsibility for the war that now hangs around the President's neck like a millstone. Last week in Charleston, South Carolina, he too conceded that the often-cited weapons had not been found. However, he stubbornly stuck to his justification for the preventive attack: "Based on what I knew then and based on what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq."

Now he feels compelled to appoint a commission to determine the true reasons why the CIA supplied false information on Saddam's weapons arsenal. Bush, who can appoint the members of this body himself, asked former Democratic Senator Chuck Robb, once a conservative judge, to serve as its chairman. However, the commission will not present its findings until 2005, after the presidential election. Of course, the President is hoping to be cleared of any blame, just as Tony Blair has managed to stage his own acquittal.

These days, Bush is becoming increasingly driven by events he no longer controls. Shiite leader Ali al-Sistani apparently has more influence over the timing and course of the power transfer in Iraq than the superpower. Moreover, the occupying army continues to be powerless against devastating attacks.

Following the capture of Saddam, the United States had hoped that the attacks in Iraq would begin to subside. However, this has not proven to be the case. Last week, two suicide bombers wiped out a portion of the Kurdish elite, killing 110 people in the attacks in Arbil. Furthermore, American soldiers are killed on a daily basis - painful reminders of a military adventure that was thoughtlessly initiated by the Bush administration.

An opinion poll conducted by the Associated Press reveals just how much Bush' popularity has suffered: His job approval rating has dropped to 47 percent, which is even lower than it was prior to September 11, 2001. Contrary to expectations, Bush will not be able to simply coast toward reelection as a patriotic wartime president.

Until now, however, he has been able to rely on his luck. When his approval ratings suddenly dropped last fall, Saddam was discovered in a hole in the ground and then the economy began showing signs of recovery. Could Bush' luck return?

A healthy recovery at the right time would certainly increase his chances for reelection. This is exactly the way things seemed to be going when the economic figures for the third quarter of 2003 were released: The economy had grown by more than eight percent, a rate of growth that hadn't even occurred in the golden nineties. According to the prevailing wisdom, these conditions should have led to 150,000 new jobs in December. But then came the shocking news: only 1000 new jobs had been created. It seems that growth and employment have become disconnected.

As the months pass, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that the economy will serve as a strong argument for reelection. Absent a miracle, Bush will go down in history as the first president since Herbert Hoover who has seen more jobs lost than created during his time in office. And Hoover had to lead America through the Great Depression after 1929.

Unemployment is currently at 5.6 percent. Since 2001, the year Bush moved into the White House, more than 2.3 million additional Americans have become unemployed. This number would be even higher if many of the unemployed hadn't simply given up looking for work.

Economists believe that the reason for this "jobless recovery" is that many companies continued to behave as if there were a recession. They laid off employees and increased productivity during the crisis. Now, instead of hiring new employees as demand grows, they prefer to continue with layoffs. This is good for the bottom line - and devastating for the employment market.

And then there is the issue of the federal budget. This year's deficit is expected to reach a record 521 billion dollars. The national debt is currently 3.9 billion dollars - a sum equal to the gross national products of Germany and France combined.