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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.

Edwards' Foundation

By Matthew Yglesias
Jun 23 2007, 11:59 AM ET Comment

I see where John Edwards' defenders against yesterday's New York Times story on his anti-poverty foundation -- see Ezra Klein and Steven White are coming from -- there's nothing very scandalous here. In particular, there's nothing at all here that's scandalous if you're an even mildly cynical political sophisticate, since it was always clear if you were paying attention that Edwards' outfit existed, in part, to test the viability of a 2008 presidential bid.

The story does, however, highlight that the flipside of the Edwards campaign's heavy focus on policy has been that it's been unusually light on narrative. Edwards standard pitch doesn't much of a story about his personal and political evolution over the past three or four years which is a situation that sets himself up for various charges of being a phony. Most people I know -- myself included -- don't really care about "authenticity" in this sense and are much more interested in the policy agenda Edwards has adopted than the precise question of why he's adopted it. But, of course, politics doesn't work that way and lots of people do want at least a veneer of authenticity. This strikes me as a problem that's pretty easy to address, but it'll have to be addressed.

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