THIS IS THE PART in the movie when the battering rams smash through the besieged town’s much-reinforced-but-nevertheless-crumbling wooden gates, and the outsiders pour through the breach and then over the walls to loot and pillage at will. Arnold and his forces are at Sacramento’s gates. Think Alexander and Thebes. The gutter politics of the last few days won’t make the hand-over pretty. Gray Davis’s allies knew better, but they threw in with a small-minded man whose greatest talents were fundraising and a seemingly limitless capability to hit low.

And these allies have clung to their old tactics even to the last. California Democratic party operative Bob Mulholland, quoted in the New York Times’ yesterday on Sunday’s huge pro-Arnold rally: “He doesn’t draw as big a crowd as Hitler did.” In many ways Mulholland has been the GOP’s secret weapon throughout the campaign, reliably repulsing any audience who heard him. (I featured him for weeks on my radio show for that reason, until the dim bulb in Bob’s head went off and he fled the format.)