Huey Long, the colorful and crafty Louisiana politician, probably never read Aristotle’s guide to rhetoric, but he understood “ethos” – the technique of creating a bond between the speaker and an audience.

During one of his early electoral campaigns, a local political boss warned him, “Huey, you ought to remember one thing in your speeches today. You’re from north Louisiana, but now you’re in south Louisiana. And we got a lot of Catholic voters down here.”

“I know,” Huey replied, and for the rest of the day he began his speeches by saying, “When I was a boy I would get up at six o’clock in the morning on Sunday and I would hitch our old horse to the buggy and I would take my Catholic grandparents to mass. I would bring them home, and at ten o’clock I would hitch the old horse up again, and I would take my Baptist grandparents to church.”

Later, the boss complimented Huey on the way he had neatly bridged the Catholic/Protestant divide in Louisiana politics. “Why Huey,” he chided, “you’ve been holding out on us. I didn’t know you had any Catholic grandparents.”

“Don’t be a damned fool,” retorted Long. “We didn’t even have a horse.”