The Times Reporters try to bad mouth the poll and use individual quotes to do so, but the numbers shift is enormous.
Bush's Approval Ratings Climb in Days After Hussein's Capture
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER New York Times
The capture of Saddam Hussein has lifted Americans' view of the state of the nation and their opinion of President Bush, while at least momentarily halting what had been a spiral of concern about the nation's economic and foreign policy, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.
But even in the glow of Mr. Hussein's capture, Americans worry that United States forces will be mired in Iraq for years, are concerned that the attacks on American troops will continue and say that President Bush has no plan to extricate the United States from Iraq, the poll found. And 60 percent of Americans said the United States was as vulnerable to a terrorist attack as it was before Mr. Hussein was pulled from a hole in Ad Dwar.
Times/CBS News polls spanned the days before and after Mr. Hussein's capture, offering a vivid demonstration of the extent to which public opinion can shift in reaction to a momentous event. From Saturday night to Sunday night, Americans' view of the success of the war soared, as did their opinion about whether the nation is on the right track and their approval of Mr. Bush.
There was even a slight bump bein the number of Americans who thought the economy was on the mend, a number that had already been growing in polls since October.
In the most apparent demonstration of the shift, 47 percent of respondents said the war was going well for the United States in the poll that ended Saturday night. That number jumped to 64 percent in the second poll. Before the weekend, 47 percent of Americans disapproved of the way Mr. Bush was handling foreign policy, the worst rating of his presidency. After the weekend, that number had slid to 38 percent.
Mr. Bush's approval rating jumped to 58 percent after Mr. Hussein was captured, from 52 percent, and the number of Americans who disapproved of his performance fell to 33 percent, from 40 percent.
The first poll's findings included red flags for President Bush as he heads into next year's re-election campaign, particularly in the measure of people who thought the country was heading in the right direction, a historically reliable early indicator of the political strength of an officeholder. In that poll, 56 percent of respondents said the nation was heading in the wrong direction, compared with just 39 percent who said it was on the right track.
But by Monday, that measure had nearly flipped, with the number of Americans who said the nation was heading in the right direction rising to 49 percent, with 43 percent saying things were going awry, the second poll found.
Even the perception that the economy is getting better, which has been something of a weak suit for Mr. Bush, improved to 39 percent this week from 34 percent last week.
The two nationwide telephone polls were taken back to back, one going from Wednesday to Saturday and the other Sunday to Monday. The sample in the first poll was 1,057 adults, and it had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Another 635 adults were questioned in a second poll, and that had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.
Public opinion can sometimes react dramatically in the days after a big event, and the findings of the second Times/CBS News Poll could reflect excitement and patriotism stirred by the images of Mr. Hussein being taken into custody.
Even through the prism of this victory, the poll reflected continued ambivalence in the American public about the war, and Mr. Bush's handling of it. That sentiment that was reflected in follow-up interviews with poll respondents.
"It's a great thing; it's one less threat to the world," said Shari Cook, 44, a school cook from Farnam, Neb., and a political independent. "He's a horrible, horrible man, but I don't know that his capture makes up for all the lives that are being lost every day over there."
Michael Grimaldi, 34, a Republican who is an ambulance dispatcher from Fairfield, N.Y., predicted that the capture of Mr. Hussein would result in a decrease in the bombings in Iraq. But Mr. Grimaldi said he was concerned that the United States was now stuck there.
"It seems to me that another Vietnam is happening," he said. "I'm just hoping that since we've caught him, we can get our soldiers back home and let them deal with their problems on their own."
Nearly half the respondents said that they now believed that the United States, with the capturing of Mr. Hussein, had won the war. A majority said that the war was not over yet and that they expected troops to stay in place for years, rather than months. Most of those polled said they believed that Mr. Hussein had orchestrated the attacks on American soldiers, but a majority also expected those attacks to continue.
About 53 percent of respondents said the administration did not have a plan for rebuilding Iraq, and respondents were evenly divided over whether the White House had a plan to deal with terrorism or was only reacting to events.
Before Mr. Hussein's capture, the number of Americans who said the war was a mistake had jumped 19 points since last April, to 43 percent. It slipped back to 30 percent in the second poll this week.
There was also clear public disapproval about some ways that Mr. Bush has responded to the war at home. For example, two-thirds of Americans, including most Republicans, said they disagreed with the White House policy of prohibiting news photographers from ceremonies where the coffins of Americans troops are brought home.
The White House says that the policy is intended to protect the privacy of the families of the deceased; Democrats and some critics of the White House say it is intended to avoid the publication of emotionally charged photographs that might harden opposition to the war.
Along those same lines, two-thirds of respondents said Mr. Bush should make it a practice to attend the funerals of some Americans killed in Iraq. (That said, a quarter of respondents said, incorrectly, that Mr. Bush was attending those funerals.)
Democratic presidential candidates have been stepping up their attacks on Mr. Bush's policies on terrorism and Iraq, in the face of some criticism by Republicans who suggest that such attacks are improper at a time of war. But a clear majority of respondents, 64 percent, said such criticism was appropriate.
Kim Baatz, 25, an independent voter from Sheldon, La., said in a follow-up interview that her opinion of Mr. Bush had shifted because of the success in Iraq this weekend.
"I was leaning away from approval until the capture because I felt like the progress in Iraq was going nowhere; there were so many of our military men getting killed," Ms. Baatz said, adding, "One of the goals has been achieved."
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