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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.

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The Big States

By Matthew Yglesias

Feb 11 2008, 9:12 AM ET Comment

I wanted to see what, if any, reaction Hillary Clinton's campaign had up on their website to her loss in Maine, but it seems they're ignoring it. Also Louisiana. And Washington. And Nebraska. And of course the US Virgin Islands. Instead, the latest results-related thing I saw was a post-Super Tuesday memo from Mark Penn that featured the illogic we've come to expect from the man since long before he started working for HRC's presidential bid:

As super-delegates consider which candidate to support, they will be looking at which one candidate has a base and can win the big states, including the crucial swing constituencies. We believe the impressive wins in NY, CA, MA, MI, FL, NJ, AZ suggest that Hillary is the one who can motivate a strong turnout in November.



But of course Democrats couldn't possibly lose NY, CA, MA, or NJ there was no campaign in FL or MI and it'll be a cold day in hell before John McCain loses an election in Arizona. I think the reverse inference that Obama won swing states like Colorado, Iowa, and Missouri and will therefore carry those states in the general election doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but at least I understand what the argument is supposed to be. What about Clinton winning Massachusetts is supposed to convince me that Clinton can motivate a strong turnout?

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