Ok.
I believe your description of netroots is lacking. You say, "Their political identity is based exclusively on the opposition to the Iraq war, they don't have a well-known position on any other issue."
This is an extremely narrow view of the concept of netroots. It makes it seem as if the whole idea of netroots is some online anti-war group of people. But in reality, it is simply another form of political participation. Arguably, it began with more liberal voices, but there is certainly no small number of right-wing blogs. Netroots doesn't have any one specific position on anything, for it is the collection of all of our voices, in disagreement over just about everything. In addition, you fail to take into account one major online change since the 2004 election: YouTube. I have been telling my parents this since the beginning of this election. YouTube changes everything (Macaca, anyone?) It magnifies the smallest of mistakes because they can be endlessly repeated and it allows people to share the positive.

Then you say: "The prize for the mid-term victory does not belong to the netroots - we won because the Republicans abandoned Bush. We won because they were weak, not because the netroots finally "figured it out".
On this, you're right overall. But let's face it, the 2006 congressional elections did not have anywhere near the level of involvement or excitement around it as this presidential primary does.

Thirdly, you say the success of the Kerry campaign depended on three things, one of them: "energy and excitement of the rhetoric." I was for Kerry, and he is a good man, but one thing his rhetoric is not is energetic and exciting.

And finally, your vital point, that the overwhelming majority of voters are issues voters? Unfortunately, while that probably should be true, it's not. We do of course, have one-issue voters. People whose only issue is abortion will vote Republican no matter who the candidate is, just as people whose only issue is ending the war will vote Democrat, no matter who the candidate is. In fact, an overwhelming majority of voters don't know the exact details of their candidate's platforms, the details of their records. While I think that is starting to shift now with the increasing use of the Internet as a political tool, there are ALOT of people in this country who make their choices based on the candidates as displayed in the media, rather than researching on their own.

This is precisely the reason why the fear ads work. Fear is the most powerful force, for it overrules any logic and reason. We react to fear, we don't think it through.

Also, I might point out that the logic that says that because the so called "traditional Democratic majority" is voting for Clinton, that they will continue to do so in the general. There's simply no evidence to support that claim. If they are in fact "issues" voters, who for instance, are most worried about the economy, then traditional thought would imply that they would be voting Democrat. But that's not necessarily the case.

This is why both Obama and Clinton must be running the 3 am ad

The 3am ad is the sort of ad that McCain will run against Obama. If Hillary somehow gets the super-delegates to tip the nomination in her favor, he'll use the ad against Hillary. It works for him either way.

It just makes no sense for Democrats to try to use fearmongering against the Republicans. It's a novel idea, I'll give you that, turning their own tactics against them. But fearmongering favors the most hawkish, and although Hillary is far too hawkish for my tastes, McCain is much more of a hawk. It simply won't work.

Hillary's use of the ad only made sense as an attack on Obama, in the same vein as her comment that McCain had crossed the threshold of experience and Obama had not. It's an argument she can't win in the general election. In fact, it so clearly wasn't an attempt to make an argument in her favor that her team was completely unprepared to explain how the argument worked in her favor, and none of the examples they've come up with since then would last a millisecond in comparison to the examples McCain could put up against them.

Leave the fearmongering to the Republicans.

If Obama is the nominee, it will interesting to see Obama and McCain slug it out for the Catholic vote.

So what Clinton is doing is the pre-emptive framing of the issue that drove Democrats into the ground before.

That makes absolutely no sense. In the 3am ad she's not doing any "pre-emptive" framing. She's not doing any framing of her own at all. She's adopting the Republican frame, because it's a good frame for bashing Obama.

The fact that it would be an equally good frame for McCain to use in bashing Hillary herself ought to be as clear an indication as you could possibly need that she's done nothing but adopt the Republican frame.

She did the same when she talked about McCain having "crossed the threshold" of experience, and Obama had not. Because by any comparison to McCain, Hillary doesn't even come close. One of her key examples was an event that the local papers summarized the next day by focusing on her admiration for a really nice teapot. Hillary was quoted as saying that the teapot kept the tea nice and hot. Seriously. And in her autobiography, the event shows up but not with any significance attached to it beyond the social/photo-op aspects of it, not a word about how it might have had anything at all to do with the peace process.

If you want re-framing, Obama is the one who has done the only re-framing of this issue. He's re-framed it in terms of judgment being crucial. Hillary can't make that argument. Obama can. On the Iraq war, Hillary is McCain-Lite.

She did the same when she talked about McCain having "crossed the threshold" of experience, and Obama had not.

Just to be clear, by "the same" here I mean she adopted the Republican framing of the issue completely, not because it was helpful to her -- it wasn't helpful to her in the slightest -- but because the Republican framing was effective at attacking Obama. The fact that it would be equally effective against Hillary (or even more effective, just think about a series of "teapot" ads using the relevant photos from that photo-op and the teapot admiration quotes from the local papers, in contrast to McCains real experience) shows clearly what the intent was behind adopting the Republican frame.

Again, Obama is the only one who has re-framed the commander-in-chief question, by re-framing it in terms of judgment rather than just years of experience. McCain wins the years of experience argument hands down, but he's severely lacking in sound judgment.

One of the problems with your argument is this:
"If he couldn't win them from Clinton, he will not win them from McCain." Voting in a primary is not an indication of the voting in the GE.
Your first point (the factors for Obama's success)is also very slanted, just a repetition of Hillary's talking points.
Also, Bill Clinton only won in '92 because Ross Perot siphoned off the Republican vote.

I have to disagree on the 3 a.m. ad. I don't see that Senator Clinton re-framed the debate at all. She simply painted her face into the pre-framed portrait of McCain. Obama re-framed the discussion by saying judgement trumps experience. Clinton's assertion is the reverse, that experience is key, but she can't win the experience argument in November.

The first rule of debate, law, and politics is to fit the discussion around your strength. By playing national security, she fit the discussion around her opponent's strength, should she get the nomination. She stacked the deck against her in the long term for the sake of a short-term gain. There is no way to successfully argue national security experience with a guy who grew up in a military family, served in Vietnam, was shot down, tortured as a POW, and then came back to train military pilots. Short of McCain channeling Stockdale, his experience on national security trumps everyone else's.

So what do you do? You hit him where he can't hit back(metaphorically of course--we all know you never gut-check a Navy man. I saw the Guardian). You hit him on his foreign policy judgement. And if you can't credibly do that, you shift the discussion away from military foreign policy and towards other fights. Go for the economy--he voted for the tax cuts. Link him to Bush and duct-tape them together. Hell, if you prefer the down-and-dirty, go after his personal marital failings in his past, or his age or health, or whatever. But trying to out-experience McCain on national security is not a good long-term strategy. Everybody knows what happened when Mike Dukakis hopped on that tank.