Dan Balz is the chief correspondent at The Washington Post and its former national editor, political editor, White House correspondent, and Southwest correspondent. He is the coauthor of two books, the New York Times bestseller The Battle for America 2008 and Storming the Gates. He is a regular panelist on PBS's Washington Week and MSNBC's The Daily Rundown.

Haynes Johnson (1931-2013) was the author of several nonfiction works, including Divided We Fall: Gambling with History in the Nineties and The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism. Additionally, Johnson was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and served as an advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.