Tom Loeffler
Thomas Gilbert Loeffler is a Republican former member of the United States House of Representatives from central Texas. He was an advisor and fundraiser to the 2008 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona until resigning on May 19, 2008.
Loeffler was born in Fredericksburg in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and attended school in Mason in Mason County. He earned B.B.A. and a Juris Doctor degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas School of Law. In 1971, after just one year of private practice, he was hired by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Republican U.S. Senator John Tower made Loeffler his chief counsel in 1972. Two years later, he became a deputy for the United States Department of Energy.
Loeffler was a legislative assistant to U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., from 1975 to 1977. He successfully ran for Congress in 1978 against the Democrat Nelson Wolff, now the county judge of Bexar County. The two-term Democratic incumbent, Bob Krueger, gave up the seat to make an unsuccessful run for the Senate. Loeffler polled 57 percent of the ballots cast in the campaign against Wolff–a sharp turnabout from 1976, in which Krueger took 71 percent of the vote. However, the district had been moving away from its Democratic roots for some time.
Loeffler was a delegate to all three Republican National Conventions during the 1980s. He would never face another contest nearly as close as his first one, and was reelected three more times by over 70 percent of the vote.
After four terms in the House, he stepped down to run for governor of Texas but lost a hard-fought Republican primary election to the eventual winner, Bill Clements. Another losing contender was former U.S. Representative Kent Hance, who had defeated George W. Bush for Congress in 1978 in the Lubbock-based district. After his congressional career, Loeffler was appointed to the Office of Legislative Affairs as the coordinator for Central American policies.
In 1989, Loeffler became a University of Texas administrator. Loeffler currently works in Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist with Gray Loeffler LLC representing clients including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Like Loeffler, Clements also is active in the McCain presidential campaign.
Loeffler is the father of long snapper Cullen Loeffler. His other son, Lance Loeffler, is currently an oil and gas executive with Halliburton in Houston, TX. Lance previously worked in investment banking, holding senior level positions with both Deutsche Bank in their energy practice and UBS in their energy and healthcare practices.
