In Texas, every Doggett has his day

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 20, 1996 | by Lisa Leiter

Lone Star voters may think they're seeing double when they examine the ballot for the 10th District's House race. Lloyd and Teresa Doggett share a surname, but voters know that's where the similarity ends.

Lloyd Doggett and Teresa Doggett agree on two things: They share a last name and a spot on the November ballot in Austin, Texas. Beyond that, it's pretty much Doggett vs. Doggett, which sounds more like a divorce case than a congressional race. But these Doggetts aren't married; they're not even related. Lloyd Doggett is the 10th District's first-term Democratic representative and Teresa Doggett is a Republican business-woman who wants his seat.

The shared surname may cause some confusion in the campaign - as it may in the Ralph Hall vs. Jerry Hall congressional race in northeast Texas and in any John Warner vs. Mark Warner race for the Senate in Virginia.

"Teresa hopes to capitalize on the name confusion ... that's the sole reason I think she's in this race," the mild-mannered Lloyd Doggett tells Insight matter-of-factly in the anteroom of the House Science Committee. "Folks who have been in Austin are familiar with that and can tell one Doggett from another." He adds, jokingly, "I'm, of course, delighted that the Republicans think I've made a good-enough name for myself that they want half of it."

The assertive yet affable Teresa Doggett resisted a quip but proclaims that she will benefit from the similar nomenclature. Also, her name will be first on the ballot because Texas' governor is a Republican. "I think Lloyd Doggett's gotten elected over the years to state office because of his name and I just nullified his name identification. It means the voters can't just automatically go to the polls and say I'm voting for Doggett. Now the voters will have to think about who the two of us are and what we represent," she explained during a recent visit to Washington.

The female Doggett, a third-generation Republican, wants to represent Travis County as a pro-business, anti-tax, antiabortion legislator She grew up in Kansas - where she went to college and law school - and then worked in Washington as an Agriculture Department attorney, her only government job. After earning a master's degree at Harvard in 1982, she started a banking career before moving to Austin in 1989 with her husband, John, an attorney and businessman also known for his ardent confirmation-hearings defense of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he mentored at Yale Law School.

Teresa owns a consulting firm and created a program caned Texas Works Together, which trains working women to serve as mentors to welfare mothers. She's plugging such credentials to help woo the votes of Austin's fast-growing high-tech community, which some call "Silicon Gulch." (Its newest occupants are Samsung and Applied Materials.) She wants to give tax credits for research and training to such companies, which are frustrated at the dwindling number of skilled workers, she says. "They can't seem to get the people they need. There are a lot of people out there who need to be retrained."

Responding to expected charges that tax incentives will not fly in this budget-balancing era, she explains that "if you're getting a tax credit, it means you're profitable and paying taxes. The more people you are able to employ who are paying taxes, the more money you have in the pool."

Teresa Doggett may brag about her legal and business skills but she down-plays her gender and race - she is African-American. "I don't agree with this minority thing," she says. "I tell people that in the world at large I'm a majority." When she ran for state comptroller in 1994 - and won 45 percent of the vote - she never brought up her race. "Everybody is sick of being labeled," she said last summer.

Austin born-and-bred Lloyd Doggett says he, too, rejects the idea of labels (okay, they agree on three things) but wears one as a die-hard liberal Democrat - and a millionaire. He moseyed into the 104th Congress as one of 13 Democratic freshmen in a historic class in which all eyes focused on the 73 Republicans. He left his bench on the Texas Supreme Court to run for the seat occupied for 31 years by Democrat Jake Pickle, who retired in 1994. This was Doggett's second bid for federal office; he tried for a Senate seat in 1984 against Republican Rep. Phil Gramm, who attacked him for holding a fund-raiser at a gay strip bar in San Antonio.

Doggett began building his "dream resume", as the Almanac of America Politics puts it, while at the University of Texas, where he served as President of the student body in 1967. After law school, Austin sent him at the age of 26 to the state Senate, where during 12 Years of service he backed laws against job discrimination and so-called "cop killer" bullets. "He was one of the `killer bees,"' the Almanac reports.

There hasn't been much of a buzz about Doggett the legislator lately given the GOP domination on Capitol Hill, but he has made a name for himself as a prominent critic of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. He's no big fan of President Clinton, either. In a private White House meeting last year, the president reportedly "exploded in anger" after Doggett told him that "Americans don't know what he stands for."