Remember the part in the movie, The Wizard of Oz after the Wizard leaves Dorothy behind? Dorothy and her friends are distraught because they thought he was the only ticket out of town. And then Glinda shows up and tells Dorothy she had the power to go home all along and points to the ruby slippers. Dorothy clicks her heels, chants her, “There’s no place like home,” line and all’s well that ends well, right?

As a child I thought it was sad that after ridding Oz of the last wicked Witch, she chose to return to her colorless farm where her dog was still in danger and another twister was lying in wait. As an adult I saw something else. Glinda is Machiavelli in a pink dress.

Think about it. A girl drops from the sky out of nowhere and kills one of two wicked witches (and by the way, we don’t know what makes her wicked—Thank you Gregory Maguire for making me question everything!) freeing the munchkins from tyranny, maybe. You, the Good Witch of the North, arrives to find all the munchkins singing her praises. And then the other Wicked Witch shows up (this one admittedly seemed frightening) demanding answers and her sister’s shoes.

A plan forms in your head. For whatever reason, despite being a powerful witch who travels in magic bubbles, you’ve never been able to remove either wicked witch. Maybe it’s squeamishness about killing family or maybe that’s magic you can’t tap into. Either way, someone else has done it with little fuss. Maybe this girl can solve all your problems. So, you give her the shoes, earning her the enmity of West Witch and tell her that there’s an all-powerful wizard who can help get her home.

But if you’re a powerful witch in your own right, don’t you know that the wizard is a fraud? Of course you do, but the population having never seen a hot air balloon, has somehow deified him. Better to get this Dorothy girl to ask him for help and then discover the wizard is a fraud and reveal it to everyone—she doesn’t know anything about Oz politics. And if she’s already killed one witch, with the magical shoes she might kill another, right? It’s a gamble because what if she comes after you? Distraction.

You sprinkle the road (which, by the way explains why Glinda doesn’t just send her straight to the wizard in one of her bubbles) with misfits outside the power structure to help and even sober them up after the trippy poppy incident, but mostly you sit back. And it pays off. The wizard knew you sent the girl and gives her an impossible task of his own. A horrifying thought that some old man would send a child to retrieve a broom he had no use for. Anyway, she succeeds beyond your imaginings. The Wicked Witch of the West is dead (water, really?) and a breeze just happened to send the wizard off and away from Oz after he’d been outed (Does anyone really doubt Glinda made that man go?).

For your last bit of political maneuvering, you finally reveal that the girl can get home by clicking the heels (did that loosen them a touch?) and chanting about home. Who needs the savior of Oz sticking around? She clicks and chants and the shoes fall right off as she returns home. Now all Glinda has to worry about is that southern witch.

If you ask me, the real Wizard of Oz was Glinda.