(FORTUNE Magazine) – Ross Perot likes to refer to his running mate as "Dr. Pat Choate," and describes him thusly: "In the 1980s, Pat was vice president, public policy, at TRW, a major U.S. company...Business Week has called him brilliant...He has written six books." Clearly, the Texas tycoon thinks having an economist for veep adds some intellectual luster to his protectionist positions.

Does it? Perot's statements are true enough, strictly speaking, but look further and you'll find that: TRW fired Choate, essentially for extremism; Business Week, while noting his "reputation as a feisty but brilliant analyst," also noted that his fellow economists consider him a lightweight polemicist who takes "startling liberties with the facts." And his last book (co-authored with Perot), Save Your Job, Save Our Country, a diatribe on the North American Free Trade Agreement, was widely denounced as an assemblage of half-truths, exaggerations, and factual errors.

Choate is an example of a curious breed native to Washington: the policy entrepreneur. After getting his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 1969 and working in various agencies for various administrations, Choate set up shop as a freelance ideamonger in the 1970s. He had a good eye for issues (he was one of the first to make people worry about infrastructure, and later, competitiveness). He made the big leagues when TRW hired him as a six-figure senior policy analyst in 1981.

Choate was an early member of the small clique of Japan bashers (a phrase he and his ilk hate because it's so apt). They made a big noise in the 1980s warning that Japan was a duplicitous, venal economic and political juggernaut bent on nothing less than the domination of America--and that it was succeeding. Their rant crescendoed around 1990. That year, Choate published Agents of Influence, a book that accused practically everyone who'd ever lobbied on behalf of Japanese business interests--a group he defined to include Ronald Reagan--of being unpatriotic. TRW booted him out (Choate sued for wrongful dismissal and lost). He continued to rail against Japan. "Unless we change things," he warned in 1991, "America risks becoming a Japanese economic colony."

That statement--the whole Japan-basher line, in fact--looks pretty silly today. Far from dominating anything, Japan has struggled for years to keep its economy from imploding. America's has done pretty well.

The Japan bashers broadened their attack to include other countries. Choate joined up with Perot and Roger Milliken, the uber-protectionist South Carolina textile magnate, and concentrated his firepower on Mexico.

Instead of making Perot look respectable, his choice of Choate emphasizes how marginal and isolated the protectionist line--and Perot himself--has become. "Blaming it all on the foreigners" still resonates in certain geographical and demographic pockets of the nation, but the drift of U.S. trade policy in recent years has been steadily toward bipartisan moderation. Should Perot fall as flat as the polls predict, his campaign may be remembered as protectionism's last gasp.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Lixandra Urresta