After seeing her campaign nearly torpedoed by Obama's strong run of primary wins, Hillary Clinton has managed to scrap her way back into position where her winning the nomination is at least a possibility worth examining. She seized the initiative and the momentum in the race by striking at Obama's most obvious weakness: his lack of experience, which may give voters pause before they hire him for the toughest foreign policy job of all.

Fear. It's a terribly strong motivator. It's why stocks go down so much faster than they rise - fear is a greater motivator than greed. Hillary is scaring Democrats in two ways, writes The New York Observer's Steve Kornacki:

Hillary Clinton and her campaign clearly believe that they stemmed the mighty Obama tide on March 4 with a heaping dose of fear.

The fear that they stirred, best encapsulated in the sure-to-be-immortal "red phone" ad in Texas, supposedly worked on parallel tracks: Some voters simply bought into the notion that Mr. Obama is frighteningly ill-prepared to handle a crisis; others may not have agreed with that but grew fearful that their fellow citizens, in the face of a similar and concerted Republican assault in the fall, would.

And now that they believe they've got a hit on their hands, the Clinton forces are taking their strategy national, hoping to scare up some surprise wins in the late primary season and, ultimately, to make those pivotal superdelegates think long and hard before signing off on the nomination of someone as "risky" as Mr. Obama.

Read the whole column at the link above - the comments are modestly entertaining, too. Hillary has tried before to get the "experience" issue to the front of Democratic primary voters' minds, but she forgot the main reason why experience counts when people choose a President: it's the threat of foreign crises that worries them. Lack of experience might mean a sorry job putting together a budget or running the bureaucracy, but those things don't keep people up at night. It's the risk of an untried hand when trouble erupts that makes "experience" comforting to voters.

Whether she can work the two faces of fear - the actual fear of Obama's inexperience, and the anticipatory dread of what a Republican campaign led by a war hero might do to his electoral prospects (and the down-tickets') - into a strong enough finish in the remaining states and a strong enough argument to super delegates to at least stay uncommitted until the convention is another question. But, so far, it's the only thing that has worked.