Hillary Clinton’s strong performance in Tuesday night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas clearly came as an immense relief to her backers and supporters, who have alternately felt offended, perplexed and terrified by the improbable rise of Bernie Sanders. For many people on the Democratic left, not to mention those radicals or progressives with a more agonized or conflicted relationship to the party (or who simply hate its guts), Hillary’s resurgence after many weeks of left-wing rhetorical pummeling also marks the re-emergence of an insoluble paradox.

Which Hillary Clinton will we get, as the presumptive Democratic nominee and as the 45th president of the United States? The humane, reasonable and pragmatic leader who showed up on TV the other night, or the opinion-poll weathervane, foreign policy hawk and shameless Wall Street tool? One Clinton seems to promise a return to effective White House leadership and legislative compromise, with less high-flown rhetoric than the Obama years but greater transparency and more tangible accomplishments. The other suggests a hardened imperial presidency with a friendly female face, where the realm of political reality is defined by neoliberal economics, the Sauron-like reach of the national security state and the global tides of investment capital backed by American military power.

Hillary Clinton’s most formidable opponent on the path to becoming the first female American head of state – a development that will occur embarrassingly late in history, I have to say, after Britain and Germany and Israel and India and Pakistan and Moldova and Senegal, for the love of Christ – is Hillary Clinton. I don’t mean that metaphorically. The monstrous caricature of Hillary Clinton created by her enemies on the right, and to a lesser extent the one created by her enemies on the left, both stand in her way, their bloody fangs bared. So too, and far more significantly, does the reality that has fueled the enduring stereotype that Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted: Her actual record as an endlessly calculating policymaker and political operative whose core ideology has never been clear.

Robert Reich, the staunch liberal economist and former secretary of labor who has known both Hillary and Bill Clinton since all three were classmates at Yale, assured Salon’s readers last spring that he felt no doubt about the strengths of Hillary’s “values and ideals.” Even in that piece of relative puffery, Reich was notably unable or unwilling to explain what they were. A few months later, Reich showed up on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show to assign letter grades to Clinton’s economic platform, along with those of Sanders and Jeb Bush. He gave Clinton an A for explaining the central importance of widening economic inequality, but a “C or D or maybe even a failing grade” when it came to explaining what the hell she would actually do about it.

For those of us who will soon face the existential dilemma of supporting Hillary Clinton as the unquestioned lesser of two evils — however tepidly and against our better judgment — or turning our backs on the whole damn thing and deciding that “Game of Thrones” is more important, those letter grades delivered by one of her oldest friends sum up the problem. How do we understand the relationship between those two Hillarys, between the A-student analyst and the one who flunks out on actual policy changes that might begin to alter the dark dynamics of money and power in American society? Can we reconcile their areas of overlap and apparent contradiction? Is the first persona a cynical ruse, meant to dupe the gullible Democratic electorate one more time, like Lucy Van Pelt with that football? Does the second persona reflect an understanding that in our disordered nation realpolitik and Machiavellian maneuvering are the only possible ways to get anything done, and the fact that Clinton is too shrewd to make promises she can’t keep?

Those questions will preoccupy Democratic voters, and then the entire nation, for months to come. I don’t propose to answer them here in any definitive way. It’s nearly useless to say this amid the hilariously overheated discourse of the left, but I am neither trying to prop Hillary Clinton up nor chop her down, and I am not so deluded as to believe that I can achieve either objective. (If the great male chauvinist campaign to demolish Hillary, or for that matter the great Establishment crusade to stop Bernie Sanders, would like to ensure my loyalty, they know where to send the check.) A veteran political journalist and insider told me years ago that the only way to say anything interesting about politics was to back away from questions about who will win, or who should win, both because they are self-limiting – a reader either agrees with you or doesn’t – and because they are never as important or useful as the more open-ended questions about why events are unfolding as they are, and what stories we tell ourselves about them.