FINAL CHOICE

The 1990 book Agents of Influence by Pat Choate was roundly denounced by reviewers as an overwrought piece of Japan bashing and got him fired by TRW Inc., a high-tech company he had been serving as a kind of one-man think tank. But Ross Perot lauded the book on a Larry King Live TV show that Choate happened to be watching. Phone calls led to meetings that led to a jointly written 1993 Perot-Choate book excoriating the North American Free Trade Agreement; even some other treaty opponents found it overstated. Perot nonetheless has paid his coauthor--well, not the ultimate, or even the penultimate, but maybe the antepenultimate compliment. After other, bigger names, such as former Senator David Boren of Oklahoma and Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, refused to sign on as Perot's vice-presidential running mate, the billionaire turned to Choate, who accepted. Said Choate, the son of a sharecropper from tiny Maypearl, Texas: "It's sort of a Cinderella story."

A Ph.D. in economics from the University of Oklahoma, Choate was once Tennessee's economic-development commissioner: after he left in 1974, a state audit found his office had spent extravagantly (on staff trips and entertainment) and had "completely violated" laws regarding competitive bidding, but he was never formally charged. He later held sub-Cabinet jobs in the Ford and Carter administrations and counseled such national politicians as Gary Hart and Richard Gephardt. He was credited with alerting many politicians to the problems of preserving U.S. competitiveness and maintaining the nation's infrastructure. True, he has a penchant for apocalyptic statements--e.g., the U.S. might become a "Japanese economic colony." That, however, should fit right in with Perot's own great sucking sounds.