And the hits just keep on coming.  Just hours after the WaPo/ABC poll showed that only 43% of Americans had confidence in Barack Obama as a leader, CBS reports that their poll shows that number to be only 40%.  Fifty-four percent disapproved of his economic policies, both results a nadir in Obama’s polling in the CBS survey:

Economists have declared the economic recession over largely over, but most Americans don’t share their optimism, and they are increasingly blaming President Obama for their money woes.

Mr. Obama’s approval rating on the economy has tumbled five percentage points from last month, according to a new CBS News poll, with just 40 percent of those polled expressing full confidence in his actions.

More than half of those questioned (54 percent) said they disapproved of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy. Last month, 45 percent approved. The drop in approval has been seen mostly among independents, just 35 percent of whom now say they approve.

It may have taken longer than many of us thought, but Obama now owns the economy.  He has had eighteen months to prove that his top-down, Keynesian spending practices would rescue the US from high levels of unemployment.  As we have seen, they have had the opposite effect.  The CBS poll shows that joblessness is a key factor in the crisis in confidence:

The poll shows widespread concern among Americans when it comes to employment. Seven in ten Americans rated the job market in their area “fair” or “very bad”; only a quarter of those polled described it as “good”.

There did appear to be some optimism that the job market would improve over the next year — but not a lot. While 28 percent said they expected the job market in their area to get better over the next year, twice as many — 56 percent — said it would likely remain the same. Another 14 percent predicted even fewer available jobs in the coming years.

The news has finally caught up to Obama.  As I have charted over the past week, the percentage of civilian population participation in the workforce has plummeted to a generational low, and shows no sign of moving back into the low-to-mid-60s.  Discouraged workers have fallen out of the market at a steadily increasing rate since Obama’s election and passage of Porkulus.  Perhaps even more damaging, the media has begun routinely reporting on these issues, which has created a contrast between Obama’s “we’re moving in the right direction” rhetoric and the reality that Americans see.

CBS did not make the internals of the poll available this morning, apparently waiting for its nightly news broadcast, so we can’t parse the sample or the other questions in the poll just yet.  I’ll update this post when that data becomes available.  In the meantime, we can at least say that the CBS poll shows that the WaPo/ABC wasn’t an outlier — and that both show that Rasmussen has been correct in its polling on these issues all along.