Julia Ioffe makes campaign reporting sound like Apocalypse Now:

Others, like soldiers who have served one tour too many, are slowly losing touch with the world outside the candidate’s orbit. Bai, who is married to a Fox producer, has seen the strains of life on the road. “You lose contact with the outside world,” says Bai. “You call your spouse at home and talk about the trail and the person at home just doesn’t get it or care, because it’s the same story over and over again. It’s murder on relationships.” Every four years, Bai says, there’s at least one divorce or break-up. “It’s just not a normal human experience.”
And even if your relationship survives, your personality might not. Last week, Lizza, who was banned from the Obama plane in July, found his way back on and thought he had stumbled on a lost colony. “It felt like the Lord of the Flies in there,” he says. “The people who have been there for a long time have all of their little decorations and knickknacks all over the back of the plane. Everyone’s a little grumpy and territorial, and there’s this sense of people thrown together who have been with each other way too long. I got the sense that I was dropping in on a hostage-captor situation.”
… Like the lost souls in All Quiet on the Western Front who, home on leave, jump at the sound of a backfiring exhaust, campaign reporters eye the post-election lull with trepidation. “There is an inevitable come-down just in terms of the energy of the thing,” says Adam Nagourney, of The New York Times. “I mean, you’re going along at 100 mph and then all of a sudden it just stops. The transition to the White House is a whole different story than covering a campaign. It’s slower, more institutionalized. It’s going to be a big adjustment.”

Just as long as you don’t take yourselves too seriously.