Even as professional Republicans hasten to turn Mitt Romney into an unmentionable nonentity like George W. Bush, journalists are fanning out into the hinterlands like anthropologists to study the impact of President Obama’s re-election upon the GOP candidate’s dedicated supporters.

A friend who watched the election results in an Arkansas county courthouse described the reaction: “When ‘OBAMA AGAIN!!’ flashed across my iPad, you should have seen the looks. Utter blank stares. Devastation. They couldn’t process the fact that the president had won. It was like a couple looking over a burned-out house, with nothing left but a chimney and a pile of ashes. It was quite revealing and a bit eerie.”