The new poll reported in this morning’s Times will, I suspect, come as a shock to many political commentators. Quite a few news analyses of the assault on public-sector workers have simply assumed that the move was a political winner, with little if any thought given to the possibility that the general public wasn’t actually ready to go along. But whaddya know: while people don’t necessarily love unions — hey, I personally don’t necessarily love unions — most people apparently see them as having a legitimate role.

Again, I’m having Iraq flashbacks: there was a prolonged period when the inside-the-Beltway view was that only crackpots believed that Bush had misled us into war, even as polling indicated a substantial fraction, and eventually a majority, of the public already believed just that: