Could somebody please help me out here?

As John Derbyshire notes below, Tom McClintock is performing like a dream–articulate, thoroughly conservative, immensely knowledgeable–and I’ve fallen hard for the man. He just can’t win. I keep telling myself that, yet I find that somehow I’m unable to extinguish the last little flickering spark of hope that somehow, some way, McClintock might still pull it off.

So what am I supposed to do? Go ahead and vote for McClintock, in an act of willful and delicious abandon? Or steel myself and vote for Der Arnold, forcing myself to an unpleasant necessity? (And if you’d like a glimpse of the way McClintock could very easily hand the race to Bustamante, look no further than John Fund’s political diary.) For the past couple of weeks now, I’ve kept expecting the question to resolve itself–all it would have taken would have been one or two really impressive statements from Arnold or one or two really foolish remarks by McClintock. But Der Arnold’s campaigning has proven almost aggressively insipid, McClintock’s simply brilliant.

And my absentee ballot will arrive any old day now.