We get a brutal assessment of Obama’s performance from none other than the New York Times, which tells its doubtlessly shell-shocked liberal readers that all those “wins” in Congress are really losses. (“While he may be winning on Capitol Hill, he is losing with voters at a time of economic distress, and soon may be forced to scale back his ambitions.”) Here’s a low blow:

You know, sometimes these pundits, they can’t figure me out,” the president said last week, campaigning in Kansas City, Mo., for the Democratic Senate candidate there. “They say, ‘Well, why is he doing that?’ That doesn’t poll well. Well, I’ve got my own pollsters, I know it doesn’t poll well. But it’s the right thing to do for America.”

It is an argument that sounds eerily similar to the one Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, made to justify an unpopular war in Iraq as he watched his own poll numbers sink lower. Mr. Bush and his aides often felt they could not catch a break; when the economy was humming along — or at least seemed to be humming along — the Bush White House never got credit for it, because the public was so upset about the war.

The difference, however, is that Bush turned around the war. Obama has failed to do so on the economy and  is now paying the price for his liberal joyride:

Just 40 percent of Americans now approve of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy, the CBS News poll found. More than half said he was spending too little time on the economy. In one of the most striking findings, nearly two-thirds said the president’s economic policies had no effect on them personally — just 13 percent said they had helped them.

“Voters don’t have a checklist that they tick off, of what an elected official promised and then delivered,” said Charlie Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter that tracks Congressional races. “They were enormously frustrated last year by the fixation on health care when they wanted a focus on the economy, with Democrats losing the messaging fight on whether what they did was right and effective or not.”

Funny how the Times is just now figuring all this out. But at least the Gray Lady has, which is more than you can say for the Obami.