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Similarly, there has been a significant uptick in favor of the view that race relations in the nation are generally good. The 66 percent of all respondents who said that is the case was up from 53 percent in a CBS News/New York Times poll taken in July 2008, when Obama was preparing to accept the Democratic Party's nomination for the November election to succeed President George W. Bush. The segment saying race relations are generally bad declined from 37 percent to 22 percent.

The views of blacks on this question had almost exactly flipped in the interim between those polls. Last July, 29 percent of blacks said race relations were generally good and 59 percent said they were generally bad. In the new poll, 59 percent of blacks took the "generally good" option, while 30 percent said race relations are generally bad.

Obama's overall job approval rating in the poll was a solid 68 percent, with 23 percent disapproving and 9 percent saying they don't know or providing no answer. His robust popularity is buoyed by the near-universal support he is drawing from African-Americans: 96 percent of black poll respondents approved of Obama's job performance -- while the disapproval line in the poll data was blank. The remaining 4 percent said they did not know or did not answer.

Yet Obama still is doing exceptionally well among white respondents, 62 percent of whom approved and 27 percent of whom disapproved of his performance; 11 percent said they don't know or gave no answer..