[9/18] I'm holed up in a Washington, D.C. hotel room — blow, you winds, and crack, you hurricanoes! — and after three days on the road I've lost touch with the news from the Golden State.

Your latest charges shake me. I'll grant you that much right now.

But, Brother Hugh, may I beg your indulgence for 48 hours or so? Before either fighting back or posting a concession, I'll need to figure out what the in the Sam Hill is going on back home — and in the McClintock campaign.

More anon.

---

[9/22] Forgive this delayed response, Brother Hugh. First, I had to make my way back to California from the East Coast through airports that were backed up because of the hurricane, and then I had to spend a day taking my kids to their soccer games — after almost a week away, the least I could do for the Missus. (The soccer games showed the Golden State at its best and worst, by the way. The best? Creamy blue skies and streaming sunshine at a time of year when games back East are beginning to be played in rain, sleet, and fog. The worst? Bowing to political correctness, the soccer league has decreed that parents should cheer not just for the teams on which their own children play but for opposing teams as well. I'm not making this up.) But to return to our debate.

McClintock's decision to accept money from Indian casinos shook me, as I said the day you posted that news. But does it represent such an egregious affront that McClintock should drop out of the race? Consider a listing of each candidate's errors.

Schwarzenegger's errors?

Arnold supports abortion-on-demand, opposes Ward Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative, and rejects school vouchers. ("I became a Republican," Arnold said at GOP convention the weekend before last, "because Milton Friedman was right and Karl Marx was wrong." Milton Friedman did indeed spend much of the Cold War opposing Communism. But he has spent many years since fighting for school vouchers. Perhaps the next time you have him on your radio show, Hugh, you'll bring that to Schwarzenegger's attention.) The one position Arnold has right, his stand on taxes, looks less reassuring the more you examine it. Arnold says we're overtaxed, but Warren Buffett says we're undertaxed. Arnold could clear up this dispute between himself and his principal advisor by taking the no-tax pledge. He refuses to do so.

Arnold's campaign? If not inept, it certainly looks peculiar. Although he has proven solicitous of women, minorities, Democrats, Independents, and liberals, Arnold has made no effort to woo conservatives, the base of the California GOP. The very people who, despite shifting and difficult circumstances, have done their best to remain true to the principles of Ronald Reagan — these are the very people Arnold has felt free to insult.

Do you care about the effort to restore some sense of decency to our public life? To preserve some semblance of traditional morality? If you had turned on your radio last week, you'd have heard Schwarzenegger yucking it up with Howard Stern. There may be a cruder, more offensive radio host, but I haven't heard of him. Do you believe, with Ward Connerly, that the state of California should become truly color-blind, refusing to collect racial data? If you'd opened your newspaper last week, you'd have read that Schwarzenegger now refers to Connerly's supporters as "right-wing crazies."

While Arnold Schwarzenegger has been committing one offense after another against sound policy and competent politics, Tom McClintock has merely accepted campaign money from Indian casinos. McClintock's decision to do so disappointed me — and, if my emails are at all representative, it disappointed a lot of California conservatives (we can debate Indian gambling another day). But there was nothing illegal or underhanded about it, nothing of the dirty deal. Should McClintock drop out for fundraising? For finding the means to go right on instructing California voters in conservative principles? Brother Hugh, I think not.

Your suggestion that McClintock is already splitting the vote — some 400,000 absentee ballots have now been cast — would carry more authority if Schwarzenegger hadn't made a major effort to win over absentee voters. (Even counting the money from Indian tribes, McClintock doesn't seem to have raised more than $3 million. As best I can discover, that's only slightly more than Schwarzenegger is spending each week.) But I'll grant you that the hour draws near. My proposal: debate-plus-five.

On Wednesday, September 24, McClintock and Schwarzenegger will meet in their only debate. That debate may enable McClintock to break through — and within five days of the debate the pollsters will know. If he's still behind, even by single digits, on September 29, McClintock should drop out. But if Schwarzenegger is behind instead, then Der Arnold himself should summon the grace to say hasta la vista.

Debate-plus-five. Can we agree at last, Brother Hugh?

— 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."

[9/18] Yesterday I argued that Peter and other McClintock supporters have to begin to take Tom's campaign seriously. Wednesday's headlines should have brought all but the McClintock dead-enders to the conclusion that it is time to declare for Arnold. I will not be writing for the Friday edition of NRO, but I suspect Peter will be, and that he will use that occasion to declare for Arnold.

Two facts emerged on Wednesday that should make Peter's turn inevitable.

First, the total number of absentee ballots already cast has now passed 400,000 according to Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee, California's finest newspaper columnist on the subject of the recall. On my radio program Wednesday night, Daniel finally admitted that this number is so high as to make the number of McClintock votes already cast significant in the final tally. Tom may in fact have already delivered the state to Cruz Bustamante.

But if he hasn't, the Morongo Tribe and other Indian interests fueled by casino profits are working to assure that he does. These interests are reliably reported to have made a television buy in excess of $1 million to run ads favoring Tom McClintock. The Schwarzenegger campaign does not believe that at this point any of these ads are negative. Rather, the Tribes are going to pump up Tom's name recognition and his conservative credentials in a naked attempt to manipulate Republican voters. I expect the television spots will go negative in the final days, and they will be paid for Tribes aiming to elect Cruz.

The Tribes are of course uninterested in seeing Tom elected. They also have the same polls as every other campaign and they know that Tom has no reasonable chance of winning. They would never risk an independent expenditure campaign of this size on a conservative Republican if that candidate had a prayer of getting close much less winning.

But the Tribes know that the most efficient dollar right now is one spent on bleeding a vote from Arnold by pumping up Tom. It is cynical and unethical, but it is working.

If Tom is to avoid playing the cat's paw to Cruz's team, he will have to bow out soon and do so with an emphatic denunciation of the Tribes' tactics, and with a solid and sincere endorsement of Arnold. Given the number of the absentee ballots already received, it may be too late to keep the label "spoiler" from forever being affixed to Tom's name. But time is short indeed.

So now Peter has to really decide whether the debate over purity is more fun than a serious purpose to help the state in which we both live. William F. Buckley has famously counseled that votes should be cast for the most conservative individual who can win. That is clearly Arnold. The Tribes now it. The leadership of the California GOP knows it. I know it. And I suspect Peter does as well.

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