In California, Blood Is Thicker Than. . .

ABC News’ Z. Byron Wolf reports: No one is more worried about California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, R-Calif., decision to move his behemoth state’s general election primary up to February 5th, right in the thick of other early primaries, than Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., Schwarzenegger’s Republican colleague and the only presidential candidate from the Governator’s home state.

The switch will certainly change the 2008 Presidential election, perhaps making California much more important in the Presidential nomination process, and perhaps diluting the influence of smaller states like New Hampshire, and, worries Hunter, diluting the influence of some of the smaller Presidential campaigns, as ABC’s Political Director Mark Halperin explains here.

Hunter, like most Presidential candidates, had been focusing on small early primary states like South Carolina, where a lesser known presidential aspirant could make a name for him (or her) self on a micro level, without huge amounts of campaign coin.

"I think most would agree, except for the campaigns with the mega war chest, an early primary in California would be bad for the country," said Roy Tyler, Hunter’s campaign spokesman. "It would favor only the candidates capable of huge advertising budgets and be a enormous disadvantage to grassroots campaigns."

Hunter, unlike Schwarzenegger, is a staunch conservative running a campaign to right of many better-known, mainstream Republicans. He is hawkish on Iraq and supports fencing along the US-Mexico border.