But perhaps baseball, which is essentially meaningless, is the wrong analogy for Washington's current self-inflicted crisis.

The pressure the riots put the BlackBerry brand under was as nothing compared to a self-inflicted crisis in October.

Justice Investigation The little-known travel office became a self-inflicted crisis for the Clinton White House, which had operated in part on the advice of Mr. Foster and other White House lawyers.

Robert Chambers, sullenly handsome, vacant at the center, by late adolescence afloat on a sea of drugs and petty crime, whose response to one self-inflicted crisis after another is to fall asleep.

It is partly a self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also a result of international development policies that for decades have favored basic education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already strained institutions.

The Legislature, which previously had resisted helping well-to-do Orange County out of its self-inflicted financial crisis, voted to allow the county to transfer $810 million from special accounts over the next 20 years.

Practically every year, it seems, Congress and the President pitch the Government into another self-inflicted crisis.

Mr. Kerry's campaign manager, Jim Jordan, said in an e-mail message that the situation is "a completely self-inflicted crisis, and it's highlighted already-growing impressions of a campaign that puts expediency over principle every single time."

However, Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, said: "This is a self-inflicted political crisis and it seems to run and run with fresh allegations every day.

There is nothing in this book about the tormented journey that brought him to the White House, about the endless, excruciating, self-inflicted crises that defined his troubled life.