Eighteen thousand police officers from all around the country leaped to their feet, shouting in unison, “Wright-man! Wright-man! Wright-man…”

The man knew how to work a crowd, that was obvious. After quieting the audience, he announced that congressional leaders were ready to assist local law enforcement in purchasing technologically advanced bulletproof vests, strong enough to deflect even the powerful steel-jacketed bullets recently made legal by Congress. He took a moment to thank the manufacturer of both those bullets and the bulletproof vests that could safely absorb them, the Khyber Munitions Corporation, for its generous offer to provide both ammunition and those vests to the departments at a significant reduction.

I actually smiled when he said that. I had read about Khyber; it was the first company to sell advertising space on the jackets of its bullets.

Admittedly, it was a bravura performance, a masterpiece of political theater. It locked down the support of every law enforcement officer in the country, while at the same time reassuring anxious Americans that he was taking the steps necessary to keep them safe.

“He’s good,” I said to Jenny as the cheering faded and the networks returned to their anchors. “You know, he reminds me of something Will Rogers said.” Will Rogers was a major star of vaudeville and early movies, a comedian who appeared onstage twirling a lasso while he lamented about current events. Jenny knew all about him. I raised my index finger in the air and said, in a voice I made up that might have sounded like him, “The single most important trait any politician can possess is sincerity.” Then I slipped into my best Groucho, tapped my imaginary cigar with my fingers, and concluded, “And if he can fake that…”

She frowned. She was so cute when she frowned. She looked like my first-grade teacher disapproving my lurid finger painting. “Maybe you should give the guy a little break,” she said, raising her beer stein toward the TVs. “C’mon, Rol, look what the guy inherited. It’s going to take a long time to clean up this mess. So far he’s doing all right.”

There was a time I thought of people as diamonds, whose facets changed with reflected light. But Jenny was more like a Rubik’s Cube, a complex array of vivid colors spinning on an axis that I could never quite figure out. Maybe that was her appeal, that and her great figure. “How about your boss?” I asked. “What does she think?” Officially McDonnell was a liberal Democrat; in reality she was a hard-nosed realist who had become adroit at tweaking the system to benefit her constituents. A lot of people gave her credit for saving those shards of Obamacare that had eluded the Trumpsters’ efforts to wipe it out completely.

“Oh, you know Martha,” she responded. “She always wants more for…”—here she did her own impersonation of McDonnell’s raspy voice—“real Americans who go to work every morning to keep this country running.”

I raised my glass and clinked it against her empty stein. “To sincerity.”