TAMPA, Fla. - The balloons have been popped and the funny hats stowed away for another four years, and the Republicans and the media horde that followed them are fleeing.
Left behind, though, are some key takeaways from the 2012 Republican National Convention - takeaways that will define the presidential race ahead, and, most likely, those to follow:
1. Mitt Romney is presidential.
The Mitt Romney that Democrats have been showing us is a cold-hearted outsourcer and job-killer, but the Romney revealed at the Republican convention was something very different - a warm-hearted, generous family man who just so happens to be a very successful Mr. Fix-It.
It's about time Romney started selling himself.
For months now the Romney campaign has been violating one of the cardinal rules of politics: Never let your opponent define you.
That's just what President Obama's campaign and his allies have been doing since spring, spending millions on ads that eviscerate Romney for what happened at companies bought by his private equity firm, Bain Capital.
And while the Romney camp has pushed back hard against criticism of his actions at Bain, it has not spent much time or money telling voters who Romney really is.
Until now.
Thursday night was a virtual tribute to the GOP nominee, featuring an extraordinary film telling his life story and genuine tributes from people who know him and love him.
Then Romney hit the stage, and voters saw a smart and articulate if a bit awkward man who made a very strong case for himself. He seemed warm and genuine - and presidential.
And his performance, along with other parts of the Thursday program and Ann Romney's touching speech about her husband earlier in the week, might get more people to warm up to Romney - who, polls show, has lagged Obama badly when people are asked which candidate is more likable.
2. Romney is avoiding specifics.
Locked in a tight race with a president who has a controversial record to defend, Romney has put forth a program as platitudinous as his campaign slogan, "A Better Future."
That didn't change in Tampa.
Romney did outline a five-point jobs plan stressing energy independence, free and fair trade, job training, tax and deficit reduction and cuts to federal regulations.
The GOP nominee said that jobs agenda would create 12 million new jobs - but as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post "Wonkblog" noted, that's exactly how many jobs Moody's Analytics expects the nation to add over the next four years no matter what.
And there were precious few details of that jobs plan or anything else. Romney didn't say how he would shrink the budget or what he would do about Medicare or what a Romney version of tax reform would look like.
If you think presidential challengers are always that vague, well, they're not. As Klein noted, Obama devoted 768 words of his 2008 nomination speech to policy. Romney devoted only 260.
3. Romney is not yet in full control of the Republican Party.
Romney's campaign has been tightly controlled and strictly on-message, yet his convention was anything but.
The keynoter, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, delivered a self-serving stemwinder that didn't mention the nominee until word 1,775 of a 2,638-word speech.
Worse yet, his insistence that we are "paralyzed by our desire to be loved" followed hard upon Ann Romney's heartfelt speech where she told the audience: "I want to talk to you about love."
And Christie wasn't alone in straying from the reservation.
Rep. Rand Paul, R-Ky., waited till near the end of his speech to mention Romney and seemed most interested in revving up the delegates who were there supporting his father, Rep. Ron Paul.
Even the vice presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, seemed more bent on telling his political story than Romney's. Worse yet, he told it in a way that sent a nation of fact-checkers descending upon him.
Add it all up, and it can only mean two things, neither of them good for Romney.
The Republican nominee and his people didn't, or couldn't, exercise the clout to control their own convention.
And some of the GOP's young stars seem to be already looking past Romney and toward their own envisioned moments in the spotlight.
4. Conventions must change or die.
An act of God - Tropical Storm Isaac - saved the GOP from a fourth convention day. And this turned out to be a good thing.
Four days is just too long for any political convention when there is so little official business to be done. For both parties, these events have devolved into talkfests that often feature B-team speakers who are chosen not because of what they say, but because of who they are.
The result is often profoundly boring. Which is why, during much of the convention, so few people in the hall were paying attention to the speakers that you might have thought it was the U.S. House of Representatives.
Moreover, there's the matter of money. Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu told the Washington Post that the GOP gathering in Tampa will cost the party $100 million.
Will the party get its requisite bang for the buck? It's hard to say until we see whether Romney gets a "bounce" in the polls and whether it will last.
But with the major TV networks trimming their coverage to an hour a night and only three nights, it's hard to imagine the parties not cutting back their conventions in future years.
5. As a political pitchman and stand-up comic, Clint Eastwood is a great filmmaker.
Words cannot convey how profoundly weird the moment was when Eastwood took to the stage and talked to an empty chair that was supposedly some strange surreal surrogate for Obama.
Not surprisingly, the Romney camp quickly let the media know that the sometimes racy, always crazy Eastwood riff was unscripted and unvetted. The Obama campaign, meanwhile and no kidding, referred all questions to Salvador Dali.
In all seriousness, you have to ask the question: for the Romney campaign, was this the best use of 10 minutes of national television? Wouldn't it have been better to show that beautiful Romney biopic in prime time instead? Really, what purpose did Eastwood serve other than to eat up precious media bandwidth that otherwise would have been devoted to Romney's speech?
The hard answers to those questions will probably stop future campaigns in both parties from handing over airtime to Hollywood stars with the precise instructions: just wing it!
Then again, politics is a crazy business where crazy things tend to repeat themselves.
So don't be surprised if, at next week's Democratic convention, some brilliant party functionary figures the best way to humiliate Romney would be for Ed Asner to take the stage for a long, rambling conversation with an empty suit.
