One of the political parables about Hillary Clinton that’s kicking around the internet features Senator Elizabeth Warren talking about a bankruptcy bill. It all goes back to Hillary’s First Ladyhood. The way Warren tells it, she sat down with Clinton to explain how the bill would penalize, if not trap, single mothers dependent on child support. The point of the story is that Hillary absorbed the details in a matter of minutes, saw the big picture, and immediately understood the flaws. “I never had a smarter student,” Warren recalled. “Quick, right to the heart of it.” Hillary went back to the White House and, a little pillow talk later, Bill Clinton vetoed the bill.

The real takeaway of the story is to introduce you to a Hillary we all know—the smarty-pantsuit valedictorian and policy wonk who does the tedious homework, masters the footnotes, and gets an A+ for effort on the day’s big legislative assignment. This is the Hillary who wins honest praise from her worst enemies, men like Newt Gingrich or Lindsey Graham, because finessing an accommodating solution from the donkeywork of writing legislation is something Washington insiders admire—even if, in the bear pit of Fox News, trying to solve a problem through compromise is held out to be the problem.

Then, in the video where she tells this story, Warren adds a twist. The veto was in 2000. That was the same year Hillary got elected to the Senate from the state of New York, and she took a lot of Wall Street money to do it. When big-money interests resurrected the bankruptcy bill, Hillary voted in favor. “The bill was essentially the same,” Warren explains, “but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not.” In this account we meet another Hillary—the sellout, the do-anything-to-win turncoat, the Benedict Arnold to Bernie Sanders-style progressivism.

But wait, there’s more. If you dig a little further, you’ll find that Clinton bargained to insert a line in the legislation that protected single mothers. The Hillary we meet in this deeper version of the story is the cunning wheeler-dealer who understands that the whole game sometimes plays out inside a couple of parentheses. This is the Hillary that leftists dream about, the shrewd tactician who hides out in those details like some kind of liberal sniper, works quietly with the opponents who publicly despise her, and then achieves the best possible outcome under the harshest circumstances.

Nor does it end there; like all good parables, the story has layer upon layer of forensic meaning. Drill down deeper and you find the senator who faced the same bankruptcy bill again in 2005. This time, it contained no provisions protecting single parents, but Wall Street was pushing to get it passed. A tough call—a vote either way would reveal Clinton’s true partiality. So the liberal sniper went awol: Bill was in the hospital that week and, for the few minutes of the bankruptcy vote, she simply had to be at his side. She missed the vote but, in a prepared statement, she threw some serious shade at the bill. This is Hillary the cutthroat opportunist, the Janus-faced harpy, the sly Antoinette who wants to have her cake and let them eat it, too.