“Someone must have packed him incorrectly,” said campaign aide Michelle Strom. “He usually travels in some sort of carbonite crate, tightly wedged between two other boxes in the back of the bus. I guess something on the road must have jostled him at some point, and he came crashing to the ground.”

“This isn’t going to help us in Iowa,” Strom added.

In the hours following the incident, a wave of panic washed over the Romney campaign, which now fears the other Republicans will use the discovery that Mr. Romney is an entirely artificial ceramic work incapable of independent human thought to paint the candidate in a negative light.

“We’ve worked really hard so far to make Mr. Romney’s stance on Social Security unique and distinct from Rick Perry’s,” said Chad Fairhaven, senior adviser to the campaign. “Now that Mr. Romney has crushed himself into several sharp pieces, we worry that our work may have been for naught.”

The problems do not simply stem from Mr. Romney’s now-useless political views. Additionally, senior aides worry they may never recover each and every piece of the former governor’s intricate skeletal and epidermal fabric.

“We’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that we’re probably not going to find it all,” Fairhaven remarked. “We’re at a natural disadvantage, putting, like, 79 percent of Mitt back out on the campaign trail, whereas, say, Herman Cain has 100 percent of his skin and bones intact. It’ll be a challenge.”

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Strom interjected. “I think over the next eight months or so, we’ll definitively answer the question, ‘Will America listen to a partial candidate who definitely cannot think or speak, and might physically fall apart again in front of a national television audience?’”

“And, frankly, I’m pretty confident they will,” she finished, and proceeded to trip over Romney’s ear.

“Yes! Found it!” Strom exclaimed victoriously.