NYT:
Support for President Obama has risen sharply following the killing of Osama bin Laden by American military forces in Pakistan, with a majority now approving of his overall job performance, as well as his handling of foreign policy, the war in Afghanistan and the threat of terrorism, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The glow of national pride seemed to rise above partisan politics, as support for the president rose significantly among both Republicans and independents. In all, 57 percent said they now approved of the president’s job performance, up from 46 percent last month.
These numbers reflect a similar finding from The Washington Post and ABC, though CNN showed almost no bounce, at least in overall numbers.
You hear a lot of people warn against reading too much into these numbers. The standard analysis is generally that the first President Bush had enormous approval ratings after the first Gulf War but lost, and the second President Bush had huge approval numbers after 9/11 and the early stages of the Iraq War, but he ended up narrowly winning re-election by just 2.4%.
I agree with the general proposition that reading too much into these numbers is a mistake, but the comparisons with the Presidents Bush are flawed. This was a successful strike against a man who actually led an attack on America. The Bushes led wars against a man who did not attack America. Ironically, even though their wars were not against countries who had attacked America, both of them actually had much, much bigger approval ratings bounces than Obama—their approval was in the seventies at its peak. Obama is far below that. The American public is much more polarized now that it was in 1991 or 2003, and I think a 57% approval is much more difficult to get now than it was then, especially given the type of opposition Obama has.
That being said, the election isn't until November 2012, so the value of these approval ratings are clearly not directly transferable to the electoral battleground—there's too much time and too much that can happen between now and then. But that doesn't mean the numbers are meaningless—they give President Obama an opportunity to set and control the agenda, and how he chooses to use that opportunity will likely determine the long-term substantive impact of his short-term political bounce.
In 2002 and 2003, Bush used his popularity to start and then to prolong an ill-considered war in Iraq that eventually consumed his presidency, ignoring not just the threat posed by the people who actually attacked us on 9/11 but also the growing economic threats. In 2011, Obama will almost certainly use this event to end, not prolong the war in Afghanistan, and to refocus the country on the need to invest in our own future. That's the way he talked about it in the 2008 campaign, and that's what I expect he'll do in 2011. And the extent to which he's able to use this moment to achieve that goal will have a far bigger impact on his political future than the fleeting results the polls of today.