I haven't seen Arnold bash McClintock once - he's running against Davis/Bustamante. McClintock, on the other hand, is doing his darnedest to defeat Arnold and appears to completely ignore the purpose of the recall. I have yet to read about him or his Taliban followers making a negative comment about Davis/Bustamante, just Arnold.
As for your continued arguments about Arnold's being too far left, isn't this whole recall about California's financial situation NOT ABOUT SOCIAL ISSUES?!!! The Tombots' continued statements that Arnold WILL raise taxes isn't borne out by anything he's said.
The California Republicans are as of this moment polarized into two factions, the grassroots true believers, and all others (including state party leaders). The recall effort itself was first a war waged by the grassroots against the leaders, who consistently supported dropping the recall movement in favor of letting Davis remain as a punching bag through the 2004 national election to 2006 (and California citizens take a bullet). The state party leaders flipflopped when the recall gained so much momentum that its passage was inevitable. That flipflop is the latest of a long string of such manuevers by party leadership as perceived by the grassroots party members. McClintock has never flipflopped and all folks at the ground level along with even the leaders agree he's a true blue conservative type. Arnold's strategy is to bypass by benign neglect the entire movement which brought about the recall to begin with. He will sit down with a gossip show host from Chicago or a reporter in NYC or closed door "advisory committees" sprinkled with out-of-state liberals, but he has no time for talk show appearances or debates. So he deliberately avoided the very folks who created the opportunity (recall) which made his campaign possible, and he did it with the active collaboration of the state party leadership-- avoiding every difficult issue and detailed stand along the way (for example, "repealing" SB60 notwithstanding, it is not the perogative of a governor to repeal a bill already signed into law by a previous governor, and so on for a long list of other ducked major issues).
From this perspective, McClintock is not bashing Arnold, since Arnold himself is running fast away from the people who created the opening he is trying to move into, and doing it using techniques abhorred by those people. Arnold is attracting folks based on his star power alone, folks who probably have no concept of what conservative philosophy is. That's good except that all these new folks have no identity with conservative values, so governor Arnold will have no conservative mandate with the new folks and no mandate from the folks he bypassed and avoided in his quest for power.
I'm trying to think of an analogy. This might not be the best, but it might help for folks watching from out of state (your Hawaii flag is set ;-). McClintock and Arnold are two trains, each with loads of passengers and their own momentum. Their ideologies and histories are distinct. Their supporters are distinct. One train, running many years now, emphasizes specifics and the other, which just started a month or so ago, embodies general promises but no hard choices. In a sense, neither has motivation to change direction.
So I think it is hyperbole to describe McClintock as trying to defeat Arnold. Strip away the labels for just a moment, and what remains is a clash of conservative ideas versus popularity and opportunism. In that sense, Arnold himself is "defeating Arnold and appears to ignore the purpose of the recall."