Sometime early last May, I began to have this goofy notion, which turned into a daydream and eventually became a recurring fantasy. It went like this: One morning, I would wake up to the news that the previous evening, with no advance warning to the media, Mitt and Ann Romney stopped by the White House at the invitation of Barack and Michelle Obama. No one was certain what happened while they were there or what they talked about or how it came together, though eventually some details would trickle out. The couples told funny stories from the campaign trail and shared pictures of their families. Mitt drank lemonade, and Michelle led a moonlit tour of her garden. Everyone ate hot dogs loaded with toppings, which inspired a cable christening of the “Sauerkraut Summit.”

I knew this would never happen. It was dumb, naïve, unsophisticated and frankly out of character for me, someone with little patience for the Kabuki pleasantries of politics. It wasn’t immediately clear what drove the fantasy — a desire for less free-floating hostility in the campaign, I suppose, but that seemed too easy. Whatever the case, I was yearning for something that felt big, or at least different, even if it was just a social visit. Something that messed with what the political know-it-alls refer to as the Narrative. This spring, for the first time since I started writing about politics a decade ago, I found myself completely depressed by a campaign. “How am I ever going to get through it?” is not the question you want to be asking yourself as you enter what are supposed to be the pinnacle few months of your profession.

But that’s what I was doing to an alarming degree. Maybe it had to do with how bad off the country felt and how outmatched our politicians were by the severity of our problems and how obvious it was that the proverbial “tone” of Washington wouldn’t change no matter who won. Or maybe it was because my daughters were getting older and starting to tune in more. When I drop them off at school, I sometimes watch them stare wondrously at the vice president’s motorcade as it sirens past en route to the White House. It is a moment of fascination and reverence and one of the cool things about raising a family in what is otherwise the most disappointing city in America. I had also just been through a rough winter in which my 11-year-old suffered a head injury that brought some terrifying and unexplained side effects that incapacitated her for months. There’s something about wondering whether your kid will ever be able to go back to school and live a normal life that makes a steady ingestion of super-PAC poison, talking-point Novocain and fund-raising spam a little harder to take.

I couldn’t shake the idea of this Obama-Romney evening at the White House. I found myself talking about it to people I have actual professional or quasi-professional relationships with. The first was Alex Castellanos, the Republican media strategist and CNN contributor, whom I ran into at a wedding over Memorial Day weekend (yes, the kind of incestuous small-town encounter that also goes with living here). He said he liked it, and then he went immediately into analyst mode, saying it would be “helpful” to whoever made the invitation and was thus “seen as magnanimous.” A week or so later I mentioned the idea to a top Obama aide, who called it “interesting” and then listed all the reasons Obama does not like to mix personal time with work (see: golf invitation made to John Boehner after a full two and a half years in the White House). I started bringing it up casually to people I met at campaign events. They seemed more enthused. “It would be a sign that something nice is possible,” said Bob Grandison, a retired technician for Ohio Edison whom I met at an Obama rally in Akron.