From the US: what now for political junkie journalists?

We were once so high, not too many weeks ago. The campaign was in full swing, and even the apolitical could surprise us with a titbit here and there about who said what according to whom, how the other party responded, its play in the media, the various levels of spin, effects on polls, campaign funding, crowd numbers at rallies.

We, of course, already knew. We read it, all of it, every column inch and every comment, at the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Huffington, Drudge, Politico.com; you name it, we could cite it.

Day and night we seethed over false campaign ads, wagered bets on states like Florida and North Carolina, analysed the analyses of each candidate's health care policy into the wee hours of the morning and barked orders at the television as Barack Obama calmly proved incapable of being broken down by the demagogue-style of attacks coming from John McCain and his bulldog in lipstick, Sarah Palin.

It was an agonising two years, especially for those who had made up their minds after the first few primaries, but the suffering brought a necessary comfort, an integral balance to the political junkie's masochistic lifestyle.

Despite the media blitz on every quote, quip and gesture, we still felt as though Google News was suffering a shortage of campaign coverage pieces. The craving burned for the latest insider take, the latest endorsement, finance reports, voter registration drives. The resources were vast, but we'd read them all by 9am each morning.

We counted the days like children wait for Christmas, praying - some of us for the first time - to gods we'd only recently discovered from random Internet searches for blogs or personal websites of anything underreported in the mainstream media - we prayed that our fears of voter fraud and ballot tampering would prove to be mere figments of our Bush-Gore-induced paranoia; that the pollsters were being conservative in their lead projections rather than lazily presumptuous; and that our darling would make history as the first black president of the United States without any tide-changing catastrophes emerging late in the game.

Our hearts ached with that empty, my-dog-just-got-hit-by-a-car feeling when we missed the latest update in the Times or electoral map projection on RealClearPolitics.com. And eyes would spasm as we tried maintaining focus on the slew of words filling the response box after reading a scathing forwarded message, always from a blood relative, about Obama's Muslim heritage, his socialist leanings, his birth certificate.

We originally prayed to our newly discovered gods for Election Day to arrive. But then it did, and voting went so smoothly, completely devoid of the controversies for which we had so anxiously prepared. The polls closed, the GOP appeared to have turned off its ballot tampering machine, and the Republican nominee from the great state of "Dustbowl" finally gave us an honest, heartfelt speech: a concession to the victory of our angel, Barack Obama.

We woke up the next day with hoarse voices and a throbbing headache from the 12-hour celebration, a night during which we saw the sun rise with tearful speeches and tributes, thank yous and sharp-tongued farewells; it was November 5, and we survived. But just as we released that pent-up, GOP-fear-induced angst with a long-held sigh of relief, we choked on the next inhalation, shifting focus to the question we apparently failed to see coming, and everyone from here to Morocco seemed to be asking the same question: "What do we do now?"

We make coffee, run out to grab the paper and feverishly turn the pages looking for the latest campaign news. Beyond the expected coverage of the victory, everything we already witnessed on CNN, C-SPAN, ABC and FOX the night before, there is little worth our attention. The headlines read like Armageddon is on the horizon: "What now for GOP?" (LimaOhio.com); "What Now for Joe Lieberman?" (National Ledger); "What now for new voters?" (Medill Reports); "What's next for John McCain?" (Arizona Capitol Times); "What's Next For Sarah Palin?" (WMDT); and the truly desperate, "What now for cable news?" (Modesto Bee).

All of these headlines seem to avoid the real question: "What now for political junkie journalists?"

Three pots of coffee later we're still sitting at the computer, ignoring calls from work and impatiently refreshing the Google news page, every hour on the hour, if not earlier. Still defiant, even after the end, mumbling to ourselves "It's not over," then clicking away in search of some evidence to support our fantasy. We still have the Minnesota senatorial race, and for a while we had Alaska too, but now not even Missouri is too close to call anymore. We're left to latch on to whatever inspiration we can muster, and it comes suddenly and briefly from news that Nebraska gave one historical electoral vote to the Democrat.

We're forced to uncover our eyes and see that 21 months spent as an emotionally volatile political junkie creates the same monster as any other drug would; that excess spawns dependence; that eventually our sources are tapped and a fix is unattainable.

The fog has lifted and we're unable to look away from the naked truth of having it all stripped away in a single night, then teasingly replaced by the prospect of a stupid inauguration ceremony: loss creates delirium, and anticipation creates full-blown madness.

We plead as passionately now for the end of the Bush era as we did for the end of the sleazy campaign season. Our pleas have turned to loathing as reality sinks in and we're forced to accept that the once red-carpeted campaign trail has turned to gravel, and although the resurfacing process will begin again in two years, the World Series of politics, and journalism, will not return for another four. Four more years …

The sudden void is now screaming for its fix, and as before Election Day, it feels like ages until Obama is to be sworn in. We have the well-meaning Constitution to thank for that, as it provides us political junkies a three-month rehabilitation period to rediscover a normal sleeping pattern, regular diet and moderate level of adult beverage consumption.

The only semi-comforting part about this somehow unplanned-for state of shock is that we're not alone, we junkies. Not at all. Drained and deranged, trembling and salivating like a dog awaiting the release of that dangling bone from a teasing master, we finally arrive, all of us, but we arrive at the same dead-end location.

We're overwhelmed with a sense of uselessness. The streets are crawling with fedora-wearing newspaper men wandering around in a drunken state of hallucination, not in celebration but remorse, trying to exercise this shared demon but are capable only of assuaging the election-induced depression by moaning and puking and yelling at shadows from the streetlamps.

The daily newspaper journalists are the last to turn their backs on the campaign, to admit it is over and accept their inevitable and expected return to meeting quotas with press release regurgitations about the local Elks Lodge event this weekend, PTA meetings, flu shot season.

Media reports have turned purely speculative as the Obama presidency lays in wait and our lame duck president waddles around the White House in his last days, avoiding pretzels and contemplating how to rig the Texas governor election and unseat incumbent and actual Air Force captain Rick Perry in 2010.

Their laborious fruits come far short of quenching our thirsts as we refresh Google News and find a slew of stories only on the coulds and shoulds and mays and mights of the new administration: "Obama could signal a new brand of politics" (Oakland Tribune, Calif.); "Obama should back job-creating tax cuts" (Press-Register); Obama may reverse Bush policies on stem cells, drilling, abortion" (CNN); "Obama might tap former Bush antitrust staffer" (The Daily Deal).

We know the end has come, but the reporters still sniffing out the campaign trail are capable only of drawing private nods of sympathy, even pity, from the audience that just two months earlier had stayed up all night waiting for another instalment of the Campaign Trail blog. And then, one day, we see our journalistic heroes break down, their desperation at unfathomable lows: a Tampa Bay source informs us, "No dog yet for Obama family."

Humour columnists from LA to the suddenly great democratic state of North Carolina are far more flamboyant about their loss. They're either writing pieces about what little there is left to write about, or they're admittedly entering hibernation until 2012, when they pray for the second coming of the Palin Effect - or a senatorial run by Dubya.

The updates on the latest former vice presidential candidate pale-in comparison to the gaffes she provided on the trail; news about McCain's retirement plans are as engaging as his stump speeches were for the 1,500 people who attended months earlier; and as the Obama administration continues its search for cabinet members, the headlines are heavy in references to "vetting", the word choice surely a deliberate if last-minute poke at the Republican ticket.

Depression sinks in, the New York Times blog goes on the deactivation list, and I bow my head in shame at having to admit that I'm starting to miss Joe the Plumber.