It chews up candidates and their families, spits them out and cackles with hyperpartisan glee all the while. Yes, those candidates volunteer for it, but still. The process doesn’t necessarily serve some wondrous purpose of culling the herd and toughening the survivors, as the people invested in it — including those of us in the news media — often like to argue. Maybe it just sours them, befouls the atmosphere in which they operate and encourages voters to tune out.

It encourages would-be candidates, watching from the edge of the battlefield, not to step onto it. Mitch Daniels took a pass. So did Jeb Bush. It’s not certain that either of them, in the final analysis, would have been better than Romney. But it’s beyond doubt that the strafing they and their families would have received, along with the compromises they would have been pressured to make, influenced their decisions.

To what bliss can the person who chooses to run look forward? Relentless tedium, for starters. A candidate typically repeats the same 10 to 25 minutes of remarks at least three times a day in at least two time zones a week for at least 10 months on end, if you count the primaries. To embrace that, he or she has to be a narcissist, an automaton, an ideologue or an idealist of the very highest order. And I don’t think the idealists are exactly overrepresented these days.

A candidate must be craven about asking for money and do it round the clock, because at this point so much of it is required that for all Romney’s sterling connections and platinum panhandling, he’s still apparently coming up short. That may be the scariest story of the season.

Image Frank Bruni Credit... Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Due to the differences between a primary and general-election campaign, a candidate must be willing to waffle, and if he or she gets too accustomed to that, it can lead to moments as mortifying as one on the most recent “60 Minutes.”