In fact, he was lean and hard and fit. But his oval mug, his quick grin-he was always ready to punctuate a tirade with a rustic joke and a fleeting infectious smile-gave a false impression of softness, just as the down-home inflections and his slangy speech gave a false impression of the speaker being a “common man.”

“Hoover and Roosevelt,” the speaker said, making hostages in the same sentence of the previous president and the current one, “put me in mind of the patent-medicine drummer that used to come ’round Winn Parish.”

A parish was a county in Louisiana. I wasn’t from around these parts, but I picked up quick.

“He had two bottles of medicine,” the speaker said, in a nimbly baritone that managed to be both casual and grand. “He’d play a banjo, and he’d sell two bottles of medicine. One of those bottles he called High Popalorum; and the other one of those bottles he called Low Popahirum.”

That quick grin told the crowd they could laugh at this, and they did.

“Fin’lly, somebody ’round there said, ‘Is they any difference in these medicines?’ An’ the drummer said, ‘Why, considerable-these is both good, but they’s diff’rnt.’”

He was rocking, almost bobbing, like a child’s top, and it gave a rhythm to his speech, and held the eye.

“He said, ‘High Popalorum we make by takin’ the bark off the tree from the top down. And Low Popahirum, we make by takin’ the bark off the tree from the root up.’”

He raised his eyebrows by way of devilish punctuation, spurring a gentle wave of laughter.

His voice rose in timbre. “And these days the only diff’rence ’tween the two parties in Congress is the Republicans are skinnin’ ya from the ankle up, and the Democrats are skinnin’ ya from the ear down!”