Brother Hugh, all I have left is a handful of questions.

Q: Why is everything McClintock's fault? Schwarzenegger has 100-percent name recognition and hundreds of millions of dollars, but in the last three weeks he has flunked the very first test of Politics 101: Secure your base. Far from securing the conservative base of the GOP, Arnold has seemed to go out of his way to insult it. Warren Buffett? A major supporter of Democratic causes, including pro-choice organizations. School vouchers? All Arnold would have had to do was offer a few words of support for something like the pilot voucher plan worked out by Pete Wilson (who, after all, was twice elected governor). Instead Arnold has announced that he opposes vouchers of any kind. If he had been running the kind of race you've been advocating — that is, if he had been insisted that the only issue in this race was the budget, and then demonstrating that he intended to fix the budget without raising taxes — then he'd have won over the conservative base by now. He hasn't. And you're on McClintock's back?

Q: What are the Arnoids so worried about? There may be a few steely eyed fanatics on the McClintock side, but the overwhelming number of Tom's supporters aren't offering to march over a cliff with him, just suggesting, as am I, that McClintock remain in the race another couple of weeks. If he's still trailing Arnold ten days or so before the election, Tom can drop out then. (Depending on what the Supreme Court makes of the decision yesterday by our local jokers on the Ninth Circuit, this timetable may change.) What harm would McClintock's remaining in the race another couple of weeks do, Hugh? A few absentee ballots may get cast for McClintock that would otherwise have been cast for Schwarzenegger, but very, very few (our pal John Fund, who's doing perhaps the best national reporting on the recall, assured me the other day that none of the political pros is at all worried about these early absentee ballots). I mean, really. A politician makes the conservative case to the voters of California — and the sky falls?

Q: Sure, the probabilities continue to favor Schwarzenegger, even at this late date. But where's your sense of the open-endedness of politics? If you wrote out of American history every politician who staged a dramatic, last-minute surge or overcame enormous odds — indeed, who was written off by the journalistic and political establishments of his day — then you'd have to excise one hero after another, including the Gipper and Abe Lincoln. McClintock only needs to get to 31 or 32 percent to win. Even I can't say a McClintock victory is likely. But even you can't say it's impossible.

And won't it be fun to watch Tom try?

— Peter Robinson, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and host of Uncommon Knowledge on PBS, is author, most recently, of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. Robinson is a frequent contributor to NRO's weblog, "The Corner."

In the first installment of the great debate of the Tombots v. the Arnoids, Peter Robinson resorted to a vision of mind-control to make his points. A perfect literary device for the task at hand: Your mind has to seize up to support Tom McClintock at this point. McClintock cannot win, and the only shred of an argument that he can comes from the pollsters at the Los Angeles Times, a paper that thinks Robert Scheer is mainstream.

What is it that Peter knows that David Dreier, Chris Cox, and Dana Rohrabacher don't know, not to mention 95 percent of the conservatives in the state legislature and 90 percent of the state party's country chairmen? Peter was in the White House with Chris Cox and of course scribbled away side-by-side with Dana. He knows that these men are not the dreaded "country-club" Republicans. In fact, I don't think Dana is permitted inside most country clubs much less invited to join.

No, this trio of GOP congressmen — and the state legislators as well — know that there is no reasonable scenario under which Tom McClintock wins the recall balloting, even if Arnold stepped out tomorrow or had never gotten into the race. Repeating over and over again that lightening could strike doesn't change the underlying probabilities. With Tom out there is a huge likelihood that Arnold wins. With Arnold out, there is a huge likelihood of Cruz Bustamante winning. A refusal to deal with facts is not good politics. Which speechwriter suggested that Ronald Reagan use the quote: "Facts are stubborn things?" Was it Peter?

Now that the 9th Coupist Court of Appeals has thrown a monkey-wrench into the liberation of California we might never know whether Arnold could have won a three-way race with Tom and Cruz. But we will always know — though some will never admit — that Tom could never have won the recall. The exercise has conclusively proven that the Buchanan virus remains alive and well within the GOP.

— Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and author, most recently, of In, But Not Of: A Guide to Christian Ambition.