Every political party has its kamikaze squadrons. This year, Republicans have Colorado's Tom Tancredo and Delaware's Christine O'Donnell, the inexhaustible fountain of liberal mirth. Too bad for Democrats that their kamikazes are the Senate majority leader, the Speaker of the House, and the Obamakaze himself.

I've been thinking about this theme for several months, as Democrats launched successive waves of politically suicidal legislation and then struggled, amusingly, to explain their political collapse to themselves. But it took reading Tony Blair's recent memoir, and later interviewing him in person, to bring some thoughts into focus. It's a book Mr. Obama might want to read himself, come the first Wednesday in November.

In Mr. Blair's analysis, the party's problems were of four kinds. Politically, it had convinced itself that Britain kept voting for Margaret Thatcher not because Labour was out of touch, but because it was insufficiently left-wing. Ideologically, it failed to see that the public sector was far from synonymous with, and often profoundly hostile to, the public interest. Culturally, it didn't grasp the concept of aspiration: The idea that what the working class wants above all is to get out of the working class, just as what the middle class wants above all is to become rich.

Then, too, there was the peculiar psychology of the left:

"Progressive parties are always in love with their own emotional impulses. They have a feeling, however, that the electorate may not be of the same mind, so they are prepared to loosen them. Deep down, they wish it weren't so, and hope against hope that maybe one day, in one possibly unique circumstance, the public will share them. It's a delusion. They won't. But, though progressives know that, the longing is acute and the temptation to rebind themselves to such impulses strong."

Today, the Democratic excuse-machine sounds eerily like Labour's under Neil Kinnock. (Joe Biden is a long-time admirer.) Americans aren't happy with ObamaCare? It's because it lacks the public option. Americans don't like super-size-me government? It's because they fail to appreciate the horrors from which only the federal behemoth could rescue them. Americans aren't responding well to the administration's populist overtures, the tightness with organized labor, the rhetorical volleys against the modern malefactors of wealth? You can fill in the rest.

Still, the fundamental point is the psychological one. Oddly for a president thought to be so cerebral—and criticized by his base as excessively so—Mr. Obama has consistently appealed to Democrats' Id, the part of their psyche that consists of desire. Desire, not least in matters of racial transcendence, is what secured Mr. Obama's nomination and election. Desire, particularly on subjects like health care, taxes and union power, is what is now proving his political undoing.

(Strange contrast: Bill Clinton, whose own Id is one for the history books, nonetheless pitched himself to the Democrats' super-ego, its will to win, and reaped the electoral rewards.)

Now the president is wending his way through backyards and whining his way through magazine interviews, urging the base forward. But Americans didn't volunteer to affix bayonets and go out screaming "Banzai" when they voted for hope and change. Nor, I suspect, does the Democratic Party cherish being Mr. Obama's vehicle of choice as he heads for the carriers.

Here's what the president might do instead. Stop campaigning. Spend a long weekend at Camp David. Give Mr. Blair a call. Attend to his advice:

"The only way we [progressives] win is by being the party of empowerment, and that requires a state that is more minimalist and strategic, that is about enabling people, about developing their potential but not constraining their ambition, their innovation, their creativity."