Everyone in that room had come to celebrate him, to give him their money and their applause and, soon, their votes.

Not one of them knew that they were applauding a man who had threatened a pregnant teenager in a locked office and tried to pay her to erase her own child.

That is the thing about men like Julian Vance that I understood fully for the first time, standing in that ballroom.

Their power is not only in their money.

It is in the story, the beautiful public story, that the money buys and maintains, the story everyone believes because everyone else believes it.