I mulled the question quickly in my head, considered and dismissed Talking Points Memo and The Washington Monthly’s Political Animal (both good picks, mind you), and settled in to discuss Matthew Yglesias, who now blogs for ThinkProgress and is often referenced in my posts.

Alas, there was no discussion. The question was designed, I surmise, that the HR screener might review the answer at a later date, if at all. I suspect that neither my resume nor my off-the-cuff answers during the screening call precisely answered the criteria the firm was looking to match.

There’s a point to all this, though, and that’s that Matthew Yglesias is probably my favorite blogger writing about politics today because he’s so damn tight.  Take this two-paragraph post from last Sunday. Yglesias identifies the main idea:

It’s nothing new to learn that there are quality-control problems at the Washington Post op-ed page, but Kevin Carey’s demolishing of Lamar Alexander’s op-ed on SAFRA is really something to behold.

Yglesias pays a nod to another blogger’s takedown of a hotly politicized policy issue. As a bonus, Yglesias takes a swipe at a media institution he loves to hate, the WaPo op-ed page. Not bad for a mere 30-odd words.

But that’s just the first sentence. The rest of the first paragraph goes on to skewer the Post’s editorial page editor *and* remind readers that Lamar Alexander is a senator on a soapbox with a malignant agenda and a pack of lies to share.

Therein lies the pivot that makes the rest of the blog post work so well. Yglesias conflates The Post op-ed page with the general unreliability of the contributor. Then, in the second paragraph, Yglesias nails the problem behind the problem.

Meanwhile, I take it that if Lamar Alexander had something false he wanted to tell people about the SAT—like if he wanted to say it was bad test-taking strategy to guess randomly even if you’re able to narrow it down to two options—that Kaplan wouldn’t let him write that in one of their test prep books. Their feeling, as I understand it, is that if they expect people to pay money for test prep books then the information in the books had better be reliable and not just reflect something or other some powerful person happened to want to say.

Emphasis mine. Yglesias argues, and this is pretty much airtight as far as I can tell, that The Washington Post and its parent company The Washington Post Co. are being irresponsible by publishing fallacious op-eds that wouldn’t pass muster as content for sale under the Post’s meal ticket, Kaplan Test Prep, which accounts for over $2 billion a year in Post Co. revenue and keeps the newspaper branch afloat.

All that in a mere two paragraphs. I wish I could have accomplished as much in so little space here.

Yglesias shows us how Chuck Todd’s analysis during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary was crucial to understanding the substance behind the incoming poll results. After praising Todd, Yglesias continues:

It was great stuff. But obviously it’s not Election Day every day. There’s all this governing that happens and that’s important mostly because of its impact on the lives of ordinary people who themselves are probably fairly indifferent to politics.

And, unfortunately, that’s where the post ends. It’s a good post, but not a complete post. What I wish is that Matt Yglesias had taken his thought one step further: Chuck Todd (and the media) ought to be as excited about explaining the substance behind governance and policy as he (and it) is when explicating poll results. Because, arguably, what happens between election days is more important to more people than anything that actually happens on Election Day.

Today, Matthew Yglesias cites Harold Meyerson and says hey, if the Republican party is going to stand by as their colleague from Alabama baldly exploits procedural weaknesses to cripple government, then Democrats and the president should feel no shame in appointing all of the nominees during the upcoming recess, thus avoiding the confirmation process and Shelby’s hijack attempt.

I agree with Yglesias on this approach; we discussed this the other day. Dems need to get their talking heads out en masse, however, ahead of, during, and after such a move. Based on what I’m seeing in the mainstream media (google “Richard Shelby + hold + CNN” to see what’s *not* there), Dems will get pilloried in the press for playing hardball.

In the real world, if your problem is that 41 Senators are playing procedural hardball and making it impossible to get things done, the solution is for 59 Senators to play hardball in return and stop letting the 41 stop things. Recognize that zero voters will punish you for engaging in procedural hardball and that the number of voters who will even realize any of it happened is approximately zero.

Yeah. Like what I said in my previous post, only more concise.