James Ceaser is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Harry F. Byrd Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and director of the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy. He is the author of several books on American politics and American political thought, including Presidential Selection (Princeton University Press, 1979), Reconstructing America (Yale University Press, 1997), and Nature and History in American Political Development (Harvard University Press, 2006) ), and Designing a Polity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). He has held visiting positions at Harvard University, Princeton University, Oxford University, the University of Basel, and the University of Bordeaux. He is a frequent contributor to the popular press, most recently the Weekly Standard and the National Review.