Sean Wilentz, a professor at Princeton who writes inane books about Bob Dylan when he’s not producing Rube Goldberg studies of the Reagan presidency designed to demonstrate that Reagan’s primary accomplishment was reducing the number of nuclear weapons in American hands, has outdone himself this morning in a story about Barack Obama’s economic policies:

Some supporters say that Obama mistakenly thought he could leverage his campaign-era image as someone who transcended conventional politics to compromise with Republicans once in power.

“The president said that the politics of the ’90s had grown so bitter because of partisanship on both sides. He was going to fix that by reaching out to sensible, flexible people in the Republican party to come up with common sense economic policies. That approach was doomed from the start,” said Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University.

(First of all, the politics of the ’90s? But let’s leave that peculiar statement to one side.) When exactly did Obama take the approach Wilentz outlines? It may have been “doomed from the start,” but Obama was the one who doomed it, and for good reason.

He supposedly “courted” Republican votes for his stimulus package, but given that he was unwilling to change it in any way to make it palatable to them and given that he could get it passed without them owing to the sizes of the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, he didn’t need them—and the three liberal Republicans who voted for it in the Senate did so while making very , very modest requests for changes to give them some cover. Had the stimulus worked as he hoped it would, it would have been such a triumph for the Democrats and for Obama that they could claim sole credit for it; just as it is to their great sorrow now that they cannot lay the blame off on Republicans.

The only clear case of Obama compromising significantly in order to get votes in the Senate was when he abandoned the “public option” in late 2010—and the cause of the gridlock there was one Joseph I. Lieberman, Senator from Connecticut. Now, Wilentz may think Lieberman is a Republican; for Wilentz, after all, the word “Republican” and the word “evil” are very nearly coterminous. But he isn’t a Republican. What Wilentz is I leave to you to decide.