WASHINGTON: Ever since he began running for president, George W. Bush has told Americans that he is a ‘plain-spoken man’, a leader who would never play games with words. “Whether you agree with me or not, you know where I stand,” he said during his 2004 re-election campaign.

In a narrow sense, last week’s disclosure of testimony that Bush authorized a leak of classified information to bolster his case for the war in Iraq poses a problem for the White House, because it appears to conflict with the president’s promise to be a straight shooter.

More broadly, the leak controversy may be only a small part of a larger problem: a continuing erosion of public confidence in the president’s credibility, especially on Iraq, which has become the defining issue of his presidency.

In public, the White House and the Republican National Committee dismissed the controversy as a partisan sideshow. Bush doesn’t have a credibility problem, spokesman Scott McClellan said; “the Democrats have a credibility problem when they try to suggest that we were manipulating intelligence.” But independent pollsters and political scientists — as well as some Republican strategists — disagree.

“This kind of story hits at one of the president’s few remaining strengths, the perception that he is principled,” said Christopher Gelpi of Duke University, who has generally been sympathetic to the White House. “The president’s credibility on Iraq is already low outside the Republican Party, and this digs the hole deeper.”

Said Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio: “This isn’t good. When your image is being battered on a host of other issues, the one thing you don’t need is a question of veracity.”

However, he added: “Let’s not exaggerate the importance of this.... By no stretch of the imagination is this Nixon-esque.”

Congressional Republicans declined to comment, even as Democratic leaders seized the opportunity to condemn the president and demand an investigation. “It’s certainly not good,” an aide to a leading Republican senator said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk on the record. “But we want to see how it settles out.”

Some Republicans predicted that the issue would go nowhere. “This needs to play out over the next seven days,” said Joseph E. diGenova, a federal prosecutor under President Reagan. “This is just inside-the-Beltway stuff. If Republicans stick with [Bush], it will become a partisan issue and people will turn it off.”

But others were more worried. “For the first time, this issue has been taken right into ... the Oval Office,” said a senior GOP figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid harming his relationship with the White House. “That’s not a small step. It’s a huge step.”

Last week’s controversy was touched off by a court document filed by a special prosecutor seeking a perjury conviction against I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

According to the prosecutor, Libby has testified that he gave classified information about US intelligence on Iraq to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in 2003 after Cheney told him that Bush had personally approved the secret disclosure.

Libby’s leak apparently was intended to encourage Miller to write an article saying that US intelligence agencies genuinely believed that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein had sought nuclear weapons.

At the time, the White House was trying to rebut charges from former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that the administration had exaggerated Iraq’s nuclear programmes. During the same period, it was disclosed that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA officer.

The potentially criminal disclosure of Plame’s identity launched the investigation that led to Libby’s indictment on perjury charges.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service