The relationship between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, the Party’s most likely Presidential nominee, goes back to the second half of the Clinton Administration. Warren told me recently that the most dramatic policy fight of her life was one in which Bill and Hillary Clinton were intimately involved. She recalls it as the “ten-year war.” Between 1995 and 2005, Warren, a professor who had established herself as one of the country’s foremost experts on bankruptcy law, managed to turn an arcane issue of financial regulation into a major political issue.

In the late nineteen-nineties, Congress was trying to pass a bankruptcy bill that Warren felt was written, essentially, by the credit-card industry. For several years, through a growing network of allies in Washington, she helped liberals in Congress fight the bill, but at the end of the Clinton Administration the bill seemed on the verge of passage. Clinton’s economic team was divided, much as Democrats today are split over economic policy. His progressive aides opposed the bill; aides who were more sympathetic to the financial industry supported it. Warren targeted the one person in the White House who she believed could stop the legislation: the First Lady. They met alone for half an hour, and, according to Warren, Hillary stood up and declared, “Well, I’m convinced. It is our job to stop that awful bill. You help me and I’ll help you.” In the Administration’s closing weeks, Hillary persuaded Bill Clinton not to sign the legislation, effectively vetoing it.

But just a few months later, in 2001, Hillary was a senator from New York, the home of the financial industry, and she voted in favor of a version of the same bill. It passed, and George W. Bush signed it into law, ending Warren’s ten-year war with a crushing defeat. “There were a lot of people who voted for that bill who thought that there was going to be no political price to pay,” Warren told me.

Warren is not running for President. But she is mounting a campaign to insure that Clinton and other prominent Democrats adhere to her agenda of reversing income inequality and beating back the influence of corporate power in politics. These are issues that Warren has pursued for three decades, as an academic, a policy adviser to Democrats, an Obama Administration regulator, and, since 2012, a U.S. senator and the anchor of a progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Clinton has taken notice. Last December, she invited Warren to a private meeting at her Washington home, near Embassy Row, to hear Warren’s advice on issues such as income inequality. In recent months, members of Clinton’s policy team have consulted with Dan Geldon, one of Warren’s closest advisers, about economic policy. And a few days after Clinton’s official announcement, on April 12th, that she is running for President, she wrote a paean to Warren in Time, saying that Warren “never hesitates to hold powerful people’s feet to the fire: bankers, lobbyists, senior government officials and, yes, even presidential aspirants.”

Clinton even sounds like Warren these days, evidently hoping to fend off charges that she is a captive of Wall Street money and influence. In the video in which Clinton announced her candidacy, she says, “The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.” Two days later, during a stop in Iowa, she noted, “Hedge-fund managers pay lower taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80, when I was driving here over the last two days.” And in a fund-raising e-mail she wrote, “The average CEO makes 300 times what the average worker makes.”

Clinton’s people insist that any similarity to Warren is coincidental. “Hillary was talking about rising inequality and how the deck was stacked against people in 2007 and 2008,” Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, and a policy adviser to Hillary Clinton, said. “I see a lot of overlap. I do not see a causal link from one person to the other.” The Warren camp seems to have a different view. Last week, Warren’s advisers privately circulated a picture showing the two women sitting beside each other, a quote bubble emanating from Clinton: “What she said.” When I asked Warren last week if she believed that Clinton was co-opting her message, she hesitated and replied, “Eh.” She added, “She’s laying out her vision for the country and she deserves an opportunity to do that.” Warren may have decided not to run because she felt she couldn’t win. But Clinton’s populist turn signals another possibility: Warren feels that she can accomplish more from the sidelines.

“I think she’s doing exactly the right thing,” Barney Frank, the former congressman from Massachusetts, told me recently, referring to Warren. “Right now, she’s as powerful a spokesperson on public policy as you could be in the minority.” Frank worked closely with Warren in the House on financial-reform legislation to curb the power of banks. “She has an absolute veto over certain public-policy issues, because Democrats are not going to cross her. And if she were to even hint at being a candidate that would be over.” He added, “Democrats are afraid of Elizabeth Warren. No Democrat wants Elizabeth Warren being critical of him.”

Warren believes that, when it comes to economic policy, there is a Wall Street view and a Main Street view, and Democrats must choose sides. Her critics argue that this is simplistic and naïve, but she has buoyed many on the left who are critical of President Obama’s economic policies and advisers for being excessively influenced by Wall Street. Warren was especially unimpressed by the President’s first Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, who was appointed at the start of the financial crisis. “I was shocked that he picked the person who had just done the bailouts through the New York Fed,” she said. “I assumed that the President would want to carve a different path, and want to separate himself from the Republican-led bailout.” She added, “Tim Geithner came from the New York Fed, which, effectively, works for Wall Street.” (Geithner declined to respond on the record to Warren’s criticism of him.)

In the final year and a half of the Obama Administration, Warren will continue to take on the President over issues such as international trade and his choices for Treasury Department positions, but she will be focussing more intently on influencing Clinton. In the past two weeks, in the wake of Warren’s forceful opposition, Clinton has backed away from a major trade agreement with Asian countries that, as Secretary of State, she had helped to negotiate. But, as Warren knows, Clinton can be an inconsistent ally. Her challenge over the next year and a half is to make sure that Hillary Clinton’s embrace of Warrenism is a lasting one.

On a shelf in her Boston office, Warren keeps a glass bowl of large rocks, a gift from her advisers during the 2012 Senate campaign, when she would often say to them, “I want to throw rocks.” When I visited her in Washington in late February, though, she was in a theatrical mood, reprising a scene from the early nineteen-seventies, when she was struggling to balance the strains of new motherhood, a failing marriage, and law school. Splayed out on a chair, she demonstrated how she drove her Volkswagen Beetle with one hand, reaching with the other into the back seat to keep the baby awake.

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“No, no, no!” she yelled. “Wake up, baby, wake up, wake up! Just a little bit longer! Just a little bit longer! Do we remember the sunshine song?” She began to sing “You Are My Sunshine.” At the time, Warren said, she couldn’t get her homework finished unless her daughter napped at home; that meant keeping the baby awake on the drive back from the babysitter after class. “I learned to shift through the steering wheel, so as not to let go of that baby,” Warren said. Once, she crashed the car. “I rolled right into someone while doing that. Caved in the whole front end of that VW Beetle.”