Winston Churchill said, “If you are not a liberal at age 20, then you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at age 40, then you have no brain.”

This heart-brain analogy makes for a wonderful description of our current political situation.

The election is over and Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. His message, the liberal message, was meant to appeal to the heart. “Take from the rich and give to the poor! Affordable health care for everyone! Renewable energy only! Raise the minimum wage! Hope! Change! No more greed!” It is supposed to make you feel good about voting for him because of all the ways you’ll be helping the less fortunate or the environment, and the impact you’ll be making.

Sen. McCain’s message, the conservative message, was meant to appeal to the brain. Things such as “tax cuts for the rich,” “cut government spending,” “give the people guns” and “don’t end the war” don’t exactly give you that same warm fuzzy feeling inside, but they are effective in doing things, like boosting the economy and keeping us safe.

This year, the heart won. For the next four years, rather than effective, rational policies, we get policies that sound nice, but in reality only make things worse. People who let their emotions get in the way of their common sense are the people who are now shaping this country.

It’s not that a vast majority of Americans are incapable of understanding such things as why tax cuts for the rich will boost the economy, or why a raise in the minimum wage will put people out of work, it’s that a majority let the fact that it “feels good” to support those kinds of policies get in the way of their understanding.

Or they hate President Bush so much that they never really stopped to analyze whether Obama would be worse.

Or they have such a desire for “mommy government” to take care of them that they don’t stop and think long enough to realize that “mommy government” can’t possibly spend their money for them as well as they can spend it themselves.

In fact, the entire progressive movement in America started when women, generally thought of as the more emotional gender, got the right to vote.

The media is overwhelmingly liberal — notice how almost every newspaper in the country endorsed Obama. One of the reasons for this is that the skills required to be a journalist are not particularly logic-based.

It is this battle — between logic and emotion — that dictates the difference between a good decision and a bad one.

Think back to the various bad decisions you’ve made throughout your life.

Whether it was when you were a toddler or just last week, whether you’re a college student or a grandparent, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative, all those times when you should have known better, when, looking back, you don’t understand why you weren’t smarter than that, I’m willing to bet that almost every one of those bad decisions was the result of a single cause: You let your emotions get the best of you.

The truth is, you probably were smarter than that. More likely, you simply chose to ignore your brain. I’ve seen it happen hundreds, if not thousands of times, and I’ve even done it myself.

Very few problems in this world are caused by a legitimate lack of intelligence. More often, they are caused by individuals’ lack of willingness or ability to use the intelligence that they were given because they allow their emotions to get in the way of rational thought.

Even if you aren’t yet buying into the fact that the majority of liberal policies are not based on the way things are so much as they are the way that liberals would like things to be, this is good advice. If you can take your emotions out of your decision-making process and rely more on your brain, and not your heart, then no matter who you are, you are almost guaranteed to get ahead in life. It’s a matter of not doing what seems right in order to do what is right.

— Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering and economics from DeWitt