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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.

The Eight Year Itch

By Matthew Yglesias
May 5 2008, 1:00 PM ET Comment

I see a lot of folks mocking this grandiose claim from Bill Clinton:

Folks, it's always a mistake to bet against America. It was tough in 1968, and we came back. It was tough in 1992 and we wound up with the eight best years we've had in modern history.


Is that really such a crazy thing to say? I doubt that eight out of the best eight years ever happened during Bill Clinton's term in office. Indeed, one cause of the GOP sweep in 1994 was lingering bad macroeconomic conditions and growth was slowing in the second half of 2000. But there was a solid 5+ year peacetime boom in there with few precedents, and American living standards really did reach a peak in 1998-2000 that was higher than anything in our earlier history and that we've yet to regain. If you'd been president then, you'd be bragging, too.

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