Shortly before 9/11, a worldly-wise philospher on the seacoast of Maine
made me a prediction. "Remember where you heard it," he said. "George W.
Bush will never run for a second term. He'll resign the presidency. It's
his life story: his father's friends get him a job he doesn't deserve,
he screws it up, somebody else takes the blame, he quits, then father's
friends buy him a bigger job he doesn't deserve and he does it all over
again."

It's true the man has always failed upward. Bush even messed up his
cushiest job ever, as Texas Rangers' "owner." In reality, he was like a
glorified Wal-Mart greeter, a minority shareholder playing tycoon in the
box seats. Even so, he had a role in the worst trade of the 1990s,
sending Sammy Sosa to Chicago for the equivalent of $49.95 and a litter
of kittens. As a happy Cubs fan, perhaps I should show more gratitude.

The obvious problem with predicting his resignation, however, is that
there are no bigger jobs for sale than President of the United States.
Bush couldn't quit without admitting abject failure. Unlike Lyndon
Baines Johnson, the last Texan in the White House, there's no indication
he's got the intestinal fortitude. So I rang up my Down East friend to
see if he'd revised the forecast. Returning my call after a hard day of
tending his lobster pots, he was even more emphatic.

"Read any newspapers lately?" he asked. "He'll cut and run."

I remain dubious. Still, it's good Bush doesn't read newspapers or watch
TV news, as he told FoxNews recently, instead relying upon briefings by
his trusty aides. The evidence of his failures is all over the front
page. Even as the jobless economic recovery continued, consumer
confidence dropped and the stock market declined. Poverty levels have
risen sharply on Bush's watch; Americans are losing health insurance in
record numbers. Polls show near majorities agreeing that Bush is "in
over his head."

But it's fallout from Bush's excellent adventure in Iraq that's causing
him the most trouble. Months after he swaggered across an aircraft
carrier under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," Americans
continue to kill and die there. Meanwhile, the adminstration can't keep
its story straight. For months, the White House insisted that a
forthcoming report by U.S. arms inspector David Kay would unearth Saddam
Hussein's vaunted weapons of mass destruction. Now they say it may never
be released.

Without explaining how a country powerless to menace Jordan posed a
threat to the U.S., Bush and Powell alibied that 9/11 had changed the
equation. Except that Bush had recently admitted that "we've had no
evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11." Made after a
blustering performance on "Meet the Press" by Vice President Cheney, the
belated confession must have come as news to the reported 69 percent of
Americans who'd been encouraged to think Saddam bore personal
responsibility. Indeed, Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress
justifying war stipulated that Iraq was among "those nations,
organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided
the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

With Americans still reeling from the $87 billion price tag to pay Bush
and Cheney's pals at Halliburton and Bechtel to rebuild Iraq, the
president's speech at the United Nations was received coldly. Calling
people ingrates and cowards, then asking them to risk lives and treasure
cleaning up the mess you've made is generally a poor marketing strategy.

Meanwhile, bureaucratic warfare has broken out all over Washington. The
House Intelligence Committee rebuked CIA director George Tenet for his
agency's role in touting Iraq's non-existent WMDs. The Defense
Intelligence Agency faulted the Pentagon's--i.e. Rumsfeld and
Cheney's--credulous reliance upon imaginary "intelligence" from
defectors affiliated with Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.

But the story that has Washington journalists all worked up is what some
see as Tenet's revenge: the CIA's insistence upon a criminal
investigation to determine which White House operatives fingered
Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a spy to columnist
Robert Novak. The proverbial "senior administration official" told the
Washington Post it was done "purely and simply for revenge" over
Wilson's role in exposing the administration's phony claim that Iraq
sought to buy African uranium. At least six other journalists were also
told.

Which means two things: first, the leak was calculated and deliberate;
second, scores of media insiders already know the leaker's identity, and
suspect that the scandal may reach very close to the top.