San Anton lawyer could challenge Cornyn
Watts assails senator for allegiance to Bush, Iraq commitment.
By W. Gardner Selby
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Fueling Democratic hope that Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn's political appeal will soon crumple, San Antonio lawyer Mikal Watts has been testing a challenge to Cornyn, whom he assails for a "blind allegiance" to President Bush and the Iraq war.
Watts, a Corpus Christi native and plaintiffs' lawyer who made his name in legal circles suing Firestone, Chrysler and other big companies, could decide by June whether to declare his 2008 candidacy for the seat that Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general, won in 2002.
Lauren Victoria Burke
ASSOCIATED PRESS
John Cornyn Republican senator says he disagrees with Bush on some issues.
Alicia Mireles
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mikal Watts Big-time donor, lawyer known for fighting giant companies.
Watts, 39, ranks among a handful of Democrats who might leap in. They include former state Comptroller John Sharp, U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson of Houston and state Rep. Rick Noriega of Houston, who has said he is flattered by such speculation.
"I am incredibly worried about this war," Watts said last week. "I have no faith that John Cornyn is going to take one step to bring our men and women home."
Cornyn, 55, opposes the Democratic push for deadlines for U.S. troops to return from Iraq.
He insisted that he's not in lock step with the president.
"George Bush is a friend of mine, and he's got the toughest job on the planet," Cornyn said. "I've agreed with him when I think he's right. And I've disagreed with him when I think he's wrong."
Cornyn named as differences his support for expanded access to government records; for the regulation of tobacco as a drug (he co-sponsored legislation on the issue with U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.) and for comprehensive immigration reform: "I worry that the administration is so eager to have a solution that they're not going to insist on an enforceable border protection in place or workplace verification" of employees' immigration statuses.
Democratic activists rate Cornyn as a surprisingly little-known incumbent. A poll of 800 voters conducted April 11-15 for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee suggests that 33 percent did not recognize his name. The poll found that 47 percent of voters favored Cornyn for re-election, against an unnamed Democrat at 38 percent.
Despite recent Texas election results, Democrats envision Republican Texas recoiling from Cornyn just as voters in some states rejected Republicans last year, resulting in Democratic majorities in Congress — in great part a reaction to tough going in Iraq.
Matt Angle, who steers the Lone Star Project, a political committee supportive of Texas Democrats, rates Cornyn as a "stand-and-salute, me-too" senator who can be taken.
History suggests that it's rare for an incumbent senator to lose. The last incumbent senator from Texas to fall was Democrat Bob Krueger in 1993; he'd been appointed to fill an opening. Previously, Democrat Ralph Yarborough lost to a well-funded challenger from the conservative wing of the then-dominant Democrats, Lloyd Bentsen. That happened in 1970.
Norm Ornstein, a congressional expert with the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, likened the Democrats' chances in Texas to a snowball's in hell.
"Talk about a steeply uphill battle," he said.
Angle conceded that Cornyn, who totes more than $3 million in campaign cash and a 12-election winning streak dating to his roots as a Bexar County judge, remains the favorite. But "the favorite doesn't always win," he said.
Because of Texas' size, a candidate could need at least $15 million to be competitive.
Watts, whose law firm has won verdicts and negotiated settlements exceeding $1 billion since its founding in 1997, said that if he runs, he won't bankroll the campaign, but he'll have resources to "finish the deal."
He's proved a big donor, giving more than $2 million personally or through his law firm to state candidates or groups since 2002, according to an online search of filings at the Texas Ethics Commission. He has given more than $114,000 to candidates for federal office since 2004, according to Political Money Line.
Last month, Watts hosted a fundraiser at his home that yielded $1.1 million for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.
The event led Austin activist Glen Maxey to enthuse over Watts. Maxey wrote on the Burnt Orange Report, a Democratic blog, that Cornyn is "going down."
Watts is married and has three children. He clerked for Tom Phillips, chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, after law school and then joined a Corpus Christi firm. He left the firm, he said, after presenting his boss with a note he'd scrawled his first day on the job, vowing to have his own firm by age 30.
Early on, the Watts Law Firm had a reputation for battling large corporations, according to Law.com, including a 1998 automotive defect case in which the jury awarded $80 million — at the time the largest such verdict in state history.
The firm, which has offices in Houston, San Antonio, McAllen and Brownsville, specializes in catastrophic personal injury, products liability, aviation and toxic torts, according to the site.
Watts, who moved to San Antonio last year and enrolled his children in a local school, said he hasn't scribbled a vow to reach the Senate by a certain age.
"I'm not quite so Clinton-esque," he said, referring to the former Democratic president.
wgselby@statesman.com; 445-3644
Additional material by staff writer Tara Copp.
