Patrick Choate (born April 27, 1941) is an American economist who is perhaps most known for being the 1996 Reform Party Vice President candidate, the running-mate of H. Ross Perot. Following the 1996 election, the Federal Election Commission certified the Reform Party as a national political party eligible for federal campaign matching funds, a historic first.

Pat Choate is the Director of the Manufacturing Policy Project, which studies long-term U.S. economic policy. He previously worked as Director of Research and Planning for the Oklahoma Industrial Development Commission; as Tennessee’s first Commissioner of Economic and Community Development; as the Director of the Appalachian and then Southern Regional Offices of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA); as Director of the EDA Office of Economic Research; as the Senior Economist in the Office of Management and Budget’s Trade Reorganization Project; as a Fellow at the Battelle Institute’s Academy for Contemporary Problems and as Vice President of Public Policy at TRW, Inc. He has served on several Presidential and Congressional commissions on education, infrastructure and national security.

Michael Lind (born April 23, 1962 in Austin, Texas) is an American writer. Currently Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., Editor of New American Contract and its blog Value Added, and a columnist for Salon magazine. Lind was a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School and has taught at Johns Hopkins and Virginia Tech. He has been an editor or staff writer at The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New Republic and The National Interest.^{[citation needed]} Lind has published a number of books on U.S. history, political economy, foreign policy and politics as well as fiction, poetry and children’s literature.

A fifth-generation native of Texas, Lind graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with honors in English and History (Plan II). In 1985 he received an MA in International Relations from Yale University and a JD from the University of Texas Law School in 1988. Lind moved to Washington, where after working as Assistant to the Director of the U.S. State Department’s Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs in 1990-91 he became Executive Editor of The National Interest from 1991-94. From 1994-98 he lived in Manhattan and worked for Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic and The New Yorker. In 1998 he became Washington Editor of Harper’s Magazine and moved to Washington, where in the same year he, Sherle Schwenninger and Walter Russell Mead co-founded the New America Foundation with Ted Halstead, with whom Lind co-authored The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics.