Van Tran for Congress

NPR: GOP Hopes ‘Fresh Face’ Will Unseat Calif. Incumbent

National Public Radio (NPR) recently ran a great profile of our race for Congress.

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GOP Hopes ‘Fresh Face’ Will Unseat Calif. Incumbent
By Ina Jaffe
January 1, 2010

Republicans are hoping to make gains in the 2010 elections, and they’re looking for new voices to carry their message to voters.

One of their top prospects is California Assemblyman Van Tran. He’s the first Vietnamese-American to serve in a state legislature. Now, he has been recruited by the party to run for Congress in a Southern California district with the highest concentration of Vietnamese-Americans in the nation.

Tran has represented the 68th Assembly District for nearly six years. Before that, he was a member of a local city council. And Tran’s personal story is very much like those of his constituents. His family left Vietnam on an American military transport plane a week before the fall of Saigon, when he was 10 years old.

“It was a trip that defined … my life,” Tran says. “You’ve left a lot of memories back in the old country, and still you remember the legacy of the war, and you live through it, through your parents and through your elders as well.”

That experience, says Tran, has given him a unique perspective that has guided his political life.

“It goes back to the virtues that make this country great,” he says. “It’s all about freedom, it’s all about opportunity, it’s all about hard work and fairness and the generosity of the American people as well.”

Tran describes himself as a conservative on social issues, as well as fiscal ones. But U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who is in charge of recruiting candidates for the National Republican Congressional Committee, says he was looking for more than a conservative ideologue.

“I’m looking for fresh faces, people who understand their district, listen to their district, could actually solve problems,” McCarthy says. “When you look at this district and the makeup of it, [Tran] is one of the first names who come to mind.”