APPROVAL RATINGS UP
Not surprisingly, the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll shows very high support for President Bush (73% job approval). He gets very high ratings for his handling of the war effort (79%), with indications that the approval would continue even if Saddam remained at large or we never found large caches of WMD.
The article points out that Bush 41 had much higher numbers after Desert Storm. While that is certainly true, it should be noted that the expectations for that war were very low, set against the backdrop of a long history of military setbacks going back to the 1960s. Our stunning success in that war and later in Kosovo made military victory in this war seem inevitable and, indeed, raised expectations so high that literally any American casualties were seen as failures.
