Bush's approval ratings up after Saddam's capture

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, December 18, 2003

Bush's approval ratings up after Saddam's capture

The capture of Saddam Hussein has lifted Americans' approval ratings for President George W. Bush, latest polls published on Wednesday showed.

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The capture of Saddam Hussein has lifted Americans' approval ratings for President George W. Bush, latest polls published on Wednesday showed.

The New York Times/CBS News polls, conducted during the days before and after the capture last Saturday, showed Bush's approval rating jumped to 58 percent after Saddam was captured, from 52 percent, and the number of Americans who disapproved of his performance fell to 33 percent, from 40 percent.

The two nationwide telephone polls were taken back to back, one going from Wednesday to Saturday and the other Sunday to Monday.

Forty-seven of respondents said the war was going well for the United States in the poll that ended Saturday night, and the number jumped to 64 percent in the second poll. The first poll found that 47 percent of Americans disapproved of the way Bush was handling the foreign policy, and that number dropped to 38 percent in the second poll.

Nearly half the respondents said that they believed that the United States, with the capture of Saddam, had won the war, but a majority said that the war was not over yet and that they expected US troops to stay in Iraq for years.

Before Saddam's capture, the number of Americans who said the war was a mistake jumped 19 percentage points since last April, to43 percent. It slipped back to 30 percent in the second poll.

Findings of the first poll showed 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. The second poll found the number of Americans who said the nation was heading in the right direction rising to 49 percent, and 43 percent said things were going awry.

The first poll had a sample of 1,057 adults with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points, and the second poll had a sample of 635 adults, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.

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