They predict he will write a book, convinced that the daily diary he kept on the campaign trail would make for a compelling read. They speculate that he will return to the corridors of finance, where his reputation as a savvy chief executive and investor remains unblemished. They suspect that he could take on a major role in the Mormon Church, picking up where he left off two decades ago. In conversations over the past 24 hours, aides and advisers to Mitt Romney have begun turning their attention to an issue that until now they have never had to consider: his next move. After three decades of seamless career hopping -- from Bain Capital to the Olympic Games, from governor of Massachusetts to a six-year pursuit of the presidency -- Romney is now a restless chief executive with no organization to run.
During a meeting at his campaign headquarters in Boston hours after conceding to President Obama, Romney told his staff members that they had just witnessed his last political campaign. But he vowed, in the words of two people in the room, that "I will not fall off the map."
For now Romney, 65, seems absorbed by the present, turning over in his head a public rejection whose depth caught him by surprise.
At a breakfast Wednesday for a couple of hundred of his most loyal and affluent donors, he reminisced about the journey and tried not to cry. He waxed about the roaring crowds in the campaign's closing days and the feeling that he was winning, donors said. He marveled at the Obama campaign's ability to turn out such a large volume of voters on Election Day, though at times by using strategies that he said had unfairly maligned him.
He even took a gentle swipe at the media, mocking what he said were inaccurate articles suggesting that his oldest son, Tagg, had staged an intervention to fix a tottering campaign.
"He will be sifting through this for quite a while," said Kirk Jowers, a Romney friend. "The question is when the sifting takes a couple of hours a day instead of being all consuming."
Even his own aides said it was hard to know precisely how Romney, an unsparing self-critic, would respond to a loss that had such a personal dimension. It was his second run, and he had believed, until the very end, that he was ever so close to fulfilling the dream of his father, George, whose own presidential aspirations fell short in 1968.
Few of them can imagine him following the path of, say, Bob Dole, who traded in the title of Republican nominee to become a lobbyist and a pitchman for Viagra. Or Al Gore, who accepted his loss in public, then descended into a private slump, growing a beard and putting on weight before slowly finding his passion in environmental advocacy that won him a Nobel Peace Prize.
