Remember when Sen. Hillary Clinton was "inevitable"? That's so last year. Just ask her husband.

"I think she has been the underdog ever since Iowa," former President Bill Clinton said in an interview with a Washington radio station during last week's Potomac Primary.

Underdog? If that's not enough to make you blow your coffee through your nose, read on.

"She's had, you know, a lot of the politicians, like Sen. [Edward M.] Kennedy, opposed to her," Mr. Clinton continued. "The political press has avowedly played a role in this election. I've never seen this before."

Gee, I don't remember many complaints about the press last fall when the media were touting the New York senator's "inevitability." She was marching through the debates, deflecting her opponents with ease and confidence. Democratic bigwigs, including several members of the Kennedy family, clamored to stand by her side and fill her campaign coffers.

Yet the former president spoke as if he were back in the grass-roots insurgency that he and his wife brought to the presidential campaign trail in 1992.

Mr. Clinton's attempt to transform his wife into an underdog follows an equally bizarre effort a week earlier to brand Sen. Barack Obama with a new label: the "establishment" candidate.

A day after the Democrats' Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, Mrs. Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, told reporters, "We went through 10 days of wall-to-wall coverage of Senator Obama and his establishment campaign, of big endorsements, money, ads on the Super Bowl, and Hillary Clinton again bounced back."

Remember, Mrs. Clinton won the largest states on Super Tuesday and collected slightly more delegates than Mr. Obama. (He moved slightly ahead in the delegate count a week later.) Yet even she dropped the E-word afterward to describe Mr. Obama, as if she, not he, is the maverick outsider. "Well, he sure had a lot of establishment support yesterday," she said, "and I feel very good about the results."

So should Mr. Obama. After months of condescending hints that he's too young and too green to know the ropes of political hardball, he suddenly found himself promoted in the eyes of his opponents into a bulwark of the establishment.

The truth appears to be far more ominous for the Clinton campaign. Like the Bush administration after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Team Clinton appears to have had no Plan B for a campaign that, it turns out, was not wrapped up by Super Tuesday, as many thought it might.

Instead, Mrs. Clinton now turns to the big-state primaries in Ohio and Texas, which it appears she must win in March if her campaign is to survive.

Meanwhile, the Obama train gathers more steam. It looks quite likely that neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton will win enough delegates to clinch their party's nomination when the state primaries and caucuses end.

That throws the decision into the hands of the party's unpledged superdelegates. Their ranks, despite Mrs. Clinton's expressions to the contrary, are filled with many old "Friends of Bill and Hill." But they're also coming under heavy pressure from other Democrats to avoid overruling the popular will of Democratic primary voters and caucus-goers.

What is Mrs. Clinton to do? Her first moves have been obvious: Change the team, and change the conversation. She's shaken up her campaign staff. She's tried to shift attention away from her charisma gap with Mr. Obama and onto what she calls Mr. Obama's lack of specifics about his plans and programs.

In this Internet age, voters can easily find specifics on the candidates' Web sites and in the debates, especially now that only two candidates are facing off. But if you want to move voters off the couch and into the voting booths, I think you need more than a change in your team and your themes. You also need a compelling narrative about yourself and the direction in which you plan to take the country.

When that's been suggested in public meetings, she's pointed out that, for starters, putting a woman in the Oval Office would be a very big change. That's true. But it might not be enough.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. His column appears weekly in The Sun. His e-mail is cptime@aol.com.