You know the old saying, Is the water glass half-full, or is it half-empty? The pessimist sees it as half-empty, the optimist sees it as half-full.

My way of looking at this is: What if that’s all the water there is? Then it’s neither. It’s merely the amount that was available and is meaningless.

Of course, that’s just me.

It’s fun to look at something another way. Makes you think and all that. And yes, I have more of an article than talking about a water glass.

I’m going to talk about Hitler. Fun, huh?

When you read about what went on back in 1920s’ and 1930s’ Germany, you invariably read about Adolf Hitler and his rise to power. We all know the story, and how it ends. But what isn’t written is another way to look at how he became who he was. And that’s the fascinating story.

One of the hardest things to do in politics is to get folks to understand your agenda. For example, if you’re a liberal and want universal healthcare to be your platform, you must get your audience to understand that you believe this will be a benefit for society.

If you’re a conservative and you don’t believe in universal healthcare, you must lay out how you believe this will negatively impact society.

Pretty simple stuff.

But what if you don’t care either way, but realize that this topic is a hot-button issue that may tip the election? Then what do you do? You figure out which point of view makes folks the angriest, and feed into that anger. You tell them whatever they want to hear because folks mostly vote with their emotions.

Facts, unfortunately, are rarely part of the voter’s equation.

But back to the little corporal.

Hitler started noticing that when he gave a speech about keeping immigrants out of the country he got more of a reaction out of the crowd than when he talked about other topics. (Oddly enough, Hitler himself immigrated to Germany from Austria.) So, naturally, he ramped up that part of his program.

When he talked about the economy, he noticed that folks were eager to blame others for their financial plight, so he found scapegoats so that those folks had somewhere in which to direct their anger.

What I’m getting at in all of this is that Hitler was never actually a person that started out as Hitler. He became Hitler because that is what his audience wanted him to be. He was the embodiment of all the prejudices and hatred and fears that existed in his audiences.

Unfortunately, it turns out that kind of stuff works quite well.

And, unless people are very careful, it might even work here.

Pete Mitchell’s “In America” column appears every other Monday. He lives in Geneva. Contact him at peteinamerica@yahoo.com.