Whatever the results of the primaries on Tuesday in Indiana and North Carolina, Mrs. Clinton has accomplished the seemingly impossible in those states. Somehow, a woman who has not regularly filled her own gasoline tank in well over a decade, who with her husband made $109 million in the last eight years and who vacations with Oscar de la Renta, has transformed herself into a working-class hero.

In promoting herself as a champion of ordinary Americans in a troubled economy, Mrs. Clinton has also tried to cast her rival, Senator Barack Obama, as an out-of-touch elitist. She has made her case at all the right stops (an auto-racing hall of fame) and used all the right props (lately delivering speeches from pickup beds).

But what is more remarkable about Mrs. Clinton’s approach in Indiana and North Carolina is how minimally she uses her own biography. Perhaps because almost nothing she could say about her life would sound humble or hardscrabble  she grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb, went to prestigious schools and is, of course, a lawyer  Mrs. Clinton says very little about herself at all. Instead, she focuses on her audience’s concerns. In most speeches, she now offers just one suggestive strand of her life story.

Introducing her plans to overhaul the student loan system, Mrs. Clinton explains that although her father paid her tuition, room and board for college, he refused to pay more. “If I wanted a book or a cup of coffee, I had to pay for it with money I made,” she said Monday at a community college in Greenville, N.C. She never says the name Wellesley.

Image Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton with Gov. Michael F. Easley of North Carolina on Monday. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times

This is a surprising turn in the Story of Hillary Clinton, who spent her Wellesley years as an activist and a student leader. She wrote a chapter of “Living History,” her autobiography, about the college, but never mentioned earning money. What the work was, she does not say in these speeches. (A campaign representative said she baby-sat, did research for a professor and supervised a park.)