WASHINGTON: US President George W. Bush’s triumphant spring has been followed by a summer of growing discontent.

After toppling Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad regime with impressive ease, the US military has been suffering slowly mounting losses months after Bush himself declared the major fighting to be over in Iraq. Meanwhile, the controversy continues over how Bush and his advisors used flawed intelligence to make the case for war.

Now, the Bush administration has had to concede that the federal government’s budget deficit is growing far beyond its earlier estimates. In a country where his re-election in less than 16 months is probably more endangered by the domestic economy than foreign military adventures, that latest news puts Bush on the defensive politically.

The opposition Democratic Party saw a possible crack in Bush’s armour with the announcement last week that the deficit will swell to 455 billion dollars in the current budget year, which ends September 30, and reach 475 billion dollars in 2004. The numbers will be records in absolute dollars and are 50 per cent higher than previous forecasts just five months ago.

“President Bush is repeating two dangerous habits: misleading the American people and ducking responsibility for his mistakes,” said Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, among the most prominent Democrats seeking his party’s nomination to challenge the president in November 2004.

The White House is quick to point out that the shortfall in an 11- trillion-dollar economy is no higher as a percentage of US gross domestic product (GDP) than deficits in the 1980s. Those deficits eventually forced unusual fiscal restraint in the 1990s, and a sustained economic recovery allowed the US to grow its way out of deficits by the middle of the last decade and even achieve surpluses, if only briefly.

“The fiscal deficit in the United States will be larger this year,” said John Snow, Bush’s treasure secretary. “While this is to be expected, no one is happy about increased deficits. But our deficit level is manageable and I expect a growing economy combined with spending restraint will put US fiscal deficits on a declining path.”

Josh Bolten, director of the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), said that the deficit would be about 4.2 percent of GDP this year and next. He called it “manageable”, noting that it was smaller relative to GDP than in six of the last 20 years and far short of 1983’s GDP-measured deficit of 6 per cent.

Through 2008, OMB projects total new debt of 1.9 trillion dollars, up from 1.4 trillion dollars it expected five months ago — that’s on top of an existing national debt of 3.5 trillion dollars. When Bush took office in 2001 — just as the economy was slipping into recession, sharply cutting the government’s expected revenue curve - projections called for surpluses through 2008 of 5.6 trillion dollars.

Republicans are concerned that the deficit could become a political issue. But government balance sheets are abstract concepts with limited appeal on the campaign trail; their greater fear is that the economy will remain hesitant, or that a much-speculated “jobless recovery” will make workers nervous as they head to the ballot box.

Unemployment in the US is at 6.4 per cent, low by the standards of most industrialized nations, but a nine-year high in the United States.

Bush’s political advisors need only look at recent history to find their own nightmare scenario.

The president’s father, George H.W. Bush, briefly enjoyed record popularity at the end of the 1991 Gulf War and looked unbeatable for re-election the next year. But the US economy slipped into recession, and the elder Bush was widely perceived as indifferent to the plight of struggling workers.

A rare third-party candidate made a big splash — billionaire Ross Perot, running on a vague reform platform anchored on the big-deficit issue of that era — and fatally wounded the Bush campaign by cutting into the Republican base among fiscal conservatives.

Even now, the current president has seen his popularity eroding. The latest polls released Sunday showed his approval rating at a still-healthy 55 per cent, but far below the heights reached amid war and national emergency in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The course of the economy in the next 12 months is likely once again to decide the fate of another Bush.—dpa