“Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Mitt Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to condemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it?

“Romney’s friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.” — from an 11.9 piece by Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books, called “What Romney Lost.”