I don’t get out to the Maple Valley Farmers Market as often as I should. Apparently, I missed the Lyndon LaRouche supporters (yes, he is still alive) displaying posters of President Obama sporting a Hitler mustache.

The posters were intended to link President Obama’s support for the new health care law to Hitler’s Action T4 program, which ordered doctors to euthanize people who were judged incurably sick (including the disabled and the mentally ill). Hitler’s program killed at least 250,000 people and sterilized at least that many. I haven’t read all 932 pages of the health care reform law, but I’m pretty sure that euthanasia isn’t part of the president’s plan.

This sad attempt to influence our opinions on the president was after an appearance at the Maple Valley City Council with a misguided plea to the council to pass a resolution supporting the federal Glass-Steagall Banking Acts of 1932 and 1933. Obviously, this person has never attended a Maple Valley Council meeting, as it takes at least 20 meetings to get a resolution passed.

What’s really interesting is the influence these folks had on their argument. I can’t imagine anyone looking at that poster and saying, “Hmm, I hadn’t realized it before, but Obama really is a lot like Hitler.” If their goal was to get people to be more sympathetic to President Obama’s views, then they have succeeded.

I didn’t vote for Obama, and there are a lot of things about the health care law that I don’t like, but I’ve found myself defending him against these unrealistic comparisons to truly evil people. Plenty of other people were offended too, and this demonstration didn’t help change the minds of ordinary individuals.

Political success is determined by your ability to court the moderate voters that sway elections. One-third of us call ourselves liberals, another third call ourselves conservatives, and the rest are moderate, independent voters.

Fiery language that motivates your voting base is good if you are trying to wake up inactive members, but if you are a fringe group like the LaRouche political action committee, you just look like an angry lunatic. No one likes to hang out with angry lunatics; especially voters with moderate sensibilities, and the politicians that are trying to appeal to those voters.

What these folks have completely ignored is the simple art of persuasion.

The goal of persuasion is to help people understand your perspective. You can best achieve that by acknowledging and understanding their perspective first, and only then explain your opinion and how you arrived at your conclusion.

Good persuasion skills require you to have empathy for the person you’re trying to convince, and you can’t fake that. If you don’t already have it, I can’t help you develop it. People who don’t have empathy usually use the following tactics instead.

State your views forcefully and angrily

You see this a lot on cable news talk shows, where guests are regularly talking over each other to get their opinions in. This method has been used so often, it’s inspired a very successful parody TV show on Comedy Central (The Colbert Report).

Generate fear

In the Obama-as-Hitler comparison, LaRouche supporters are claiming that Obama is in favor of euthanizing the disabled and mentally ill. Less-nutty fear mongers claim that ordinary Americans will be put in the poorhouse, and that the whole country is going to hell. More likely, we’ll reduce the federal deficit, raise insurance premiums, put a lot of health insurance industry people out of work, and ignore the real issue of containing rising medical costs.

Just the facts, ma’am

A weak argument will simply recite facts, and then include a line about the way things ought to be. These folks can’t understand why everyone is not convinced by their research and conclusion.

But what they’ve forgotten is that facts don’t motivate people; emotions do. And Americans respond to injustice more than any other emotion. We always pull for the “little guy”, even if that guy happens to be the President of the United States.

Sorry LaRouchites, but we weren’t persuaded.