The Long and Winding Road

Gene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, says he felt "a little punchy" after holding forth as an MSNBC analyst from 5:40 p.m. until 2 a.m. yesterday, fueled only by bad election-night food. "The last hour you're on," he says, "you just kind of say something and you're running the loop back in your head: 'What did I say? Did it make much sense?' It was either deeply profound or nonsensical."

Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron says he spent part of 42 weeks on the road last year.

"I'm a sick junkie," says Cameron, reached after flying back from Texas but before boarding an evening flight to cover McCain in Florida. "Here's something pathetic. . . . It's kind of hard to reenter the real world. You're used to living out of a suitcase. When you come home and see a five-pound stack of mail, it can be intimidating. It's easier to run away to the road."

On the seemingly endless road trips, reporters and campaign aides commiserate about the lack of clean clothes and missing children's birthdays. One journalistic joke was that Tuesday's results were like Groundhog Day -- "if Hillary didn't see the shadow of defeat, we'd have six more weeks of campaigning," as Geraghty put it. The next big contest, Pennsylvania, is April 22. But could the race drag on until the previously obscure Puerto Rico primary on June 7? Or even later, if Florida and Michigan, whose delegates aren't being counted because the states flouted party rules, get to vote again?

Obama's losses followed a week in which journalists -- some of whom may have been embarrassed by the "Saturday Night Live" skits portraying them as swooning over the Illinois senator -- gave him rough treatment for the first time in this campaign. Obama even grumbled to reporters: "This whole spin of how the press has just been so tough on them and not tough on us, I didn't expect that you guys would bite on that."

But the Obama-is-inevitable spin proved as ephemeral as last year's near-coronation of Clinton. In an era of erratic polls, Cameron says, "we should listen to the voters instead of listening to ourselves offer up hollowed-out, burned-out punditry that just doesn't apply anymore."

The sheer length of the contest has led to a role reversal. "Usually the press overplays comeback stories so they can keep the race alive," Cox says. "This is a really strange phenomenon in that you're seeing people who can't wait for it to be over. There's only so many stories you can write, and we're running out of them."

If some are sick of the campaign, others are just sick. Dickerson was forced off the road after a nasty cold and constant flying led to a burst eardrum. But he says he remained fixated because the story line keeps changing and mutating.

"I could also be a geek," Dickerson says. "My family would certainly feel that way."

Furthermore . . .

The morning papers, meanwhile, seem to regard the prolonged race as a bad thing:

"Leading Democrats scrambled Wednesday to prevent the closest, most riveting presidential contest in decades from tearing the party apart, as the odds rose that neither Hillary Rodham Clinton nor Barack Obama could clinch the nomination without angering large blocs of voters," says the L.A. Times.

"After 44 contests, 28 million votes, and at least $275 million spent, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination grinds on as an increasingly brutal struggle for the soul of a party riven along the lines of race, class, gender, and generations," says the Boston Globe.