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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

Sweet Mediocrity

By Matthew Yglesias
May 30 2007, 12:36 AM ET Comment

Robert Zoellick, who doesn't seem to have done the country any good as US Trade Representative or as Deputy Secretary of State, but who also has the rare distinction of having served at a high level of the Bush administration without directly causing any major fiascos is set to head the World Bank.

A record of solid mediocrity and basic lack of distinction seems like the best we can reasonably hope for from this president, so I'll consider it a reasonably strong pick. Zoellick even has some background in financial and economic issues, unlike his predecessor. Nevertheless, I still feel that Bush should consider appointing Jim Leach to some kind of job at some point rather than endlessly relying on the team of Khalilzad and Zoellick when called upon to give a position to a non-discredited person.

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