Although New York Sen. Hillary Clinton won the largest states and collected slightly more delegates than Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in the Democrats' Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses on Feb. 5, her presidential campaign spent the rest of the week repositioning her as a kind of underdog. It all has to do with her campaign money, and who's contributing to her.

This repositioning comes down to one word, and in this campaign cycle, it's not a nice one: "establishment."

This week, Clinton and her advisers declared that Obama is the "establishment" candidate. When chief strategist Mark Penn explained the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday results to reporters Wednesday, he said, "We went through 10 days of wall-to-wall coverage of Sen. Obama and his establishment campaign, of big endorsements, money, ads on the Super Bowl. And Hillary Clinton again bounced back."

And the candidate herself said of Obama's Super Tuesday performance, "Well, he sure had a lot of establishment support yesterday, and I feel very good about the results."

All this came as Clinton revealed she had lent her campaign $5 million in late January. The loan came at a time when Obama had already been able to buy TV time for the Feb. 5 contests.

Campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe said Thursday that the loan wasn't a sign of weakness, but rather was inspiring to legions of small donors. He got the message across to reporters by letting them listen in on a conference call with the campaign's biggest money raisers, or bundlers.