(no link--I wrote it)
The Great American Classic
Rita Weinstein
Hong Tran, the 40-year-old lawyer, activist, community volunteer, wife, and mother of two who is challenging incumbent Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell in the Washington State primary race, is the embodiment of the classic American success story. Now that she’s in the primary race, she has also become the classic American underdog.
In the spring of 1975, as the Viet Cong entered the city of Saigon, Tran and her family were among tens of thousands of people trying to flee to safety. Tran was eight years old.
“We were lucky. We found a barge, that could get us out of Saigon before the Viet Cong captured the city.” After several days adrift at sea, surviving on bread and rainwater, Tran and her family—minus her father, who had gone to the Saigon airport to arrange a flight—was picked up by the U.S. Navy. All they knew at the time about her father was that the Viet Cong were bombing the airport.
In a refugee camp in the Philippines they were reunited with her father. The family made several stops, finally settling in Orlando, Florida with the assistance of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church. Other members of her extended family ended up spread across the United States as families from various locales chose to sponsor them.
Tran became a citizen at the age of 13 when her parents naturalized. While the concept of citizenship didn’t make a great impression, she discovered a passion for public service at that time. In junior high school she began delivering meals to the elderly. At Maynard Evans High School, in addition to her involvement on the girl’s tennis team, flag corps, student government, and a variety of other school clubs, she worked part-time while also tutoring other high school students in geometry and trigonometry. Eventually, she also volunteered as a tutor in a GED and ESL night course.
After graduation, Tran attended Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, where she was a member of the Circle K Community Service Club and served as club president during her senior year. “Our service projects included a big/little sister project where we paired an Agnes Scott student with a low-income junior high school girl in the Decatur area. We also made regular visits to the wing of the maternity ward of one of the large charity hospitals in Atlanta that served women with at-risk pregnancies and difficult deliveries. We read and played our musical instruments for the women.”
Tran entered college intending to become a doctor, having been inspired by the works of Drs. Albert Schweitzer and Tom Dooley in Africa and Southeast Asia. But after reading “To Kill a Mockingbird,” she set her sights on a legal career, determined to become the next Atticus Finch.
After receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1988, Tran took a year off before starting law school to earn money for tuition. For four months, she worked as a canvasser for the Florida Public Interest Group (FL PIRG) at its Tampa office, raising money for the group’s efforts to oppose oil drilling in Florida’s Gulf coast. But this job wasn’t enough to pay the rent, make student loan payments, or save for law school, so she moved back in with her parents and took a job as a bank teller.
With the help of scholarships, Tran attended law school at the University of Utah, graduating in 1992. While in law school, she volunteered at the Salt Lake Office of Utah Legal Services (ULS) – a nonprofit agency providing free civil legal services to low-income families – and the Bennion Community Service Center on the University of Utah campus.
Her areas of specialty at ULS became payday loans, fair debt collection, unemployment compensation, child custody and domestic violence issues. At the Bennion Center, she co-directed a project focused on educating local business owners to become more ethical employers—by paying employees a living wage, providing healthcare, and supporting initiatives to create affordable housing in the community.
She also chaperoned children and adults with Praeder Willi Syndrome during their annual conference in Salt Lake City; helped convert an old house in Moab, Utah, to establish the city’s first battered women’s shelter; volunteered on trail restoration projects; and established a mentoring program for minority students at the university.
She found that her work at ULS was deeply satisfying, so she decided to make a career out of helping the underprivileged. After graduation, she received a fellowship from Legal Services of North Carolina to work in its Boone office for one year. After settling into the job, she began volunteering with a local group that was working to establish a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization in the Boone area.
When the fellowship ended, she went to work with Spokane Legal Services (SLS) in Washington State. She worked at SLS until the program became a part of the statewide Columbia Legal Services. During her year at SLS, she specialized in child custody cases where there were allegations of abuse and/or neglect. She also began volunteering with Catholic Community Services Refugee Resettlement Program, becoming the personal English tutor of a Vietnamese family that had recently emigrated to Spokane from Vietnam. At SLS, she met her husband, Jon Mueller.
When SLS folded, she moved on to the Northwest Justice Project, a newly established Seattle nonprofit providing free civil legal services to low-income families throughout Washington State. Before that job began, she did a two-month stint in Harlingen, Texas, volunteering with ProBar, an organization that recruits volunteer attorneys to represent individuals applying for asylum in the U.S.
Tran’s first eight years with NJP focused on housing advocacy, representing individuals and groups denied affordable housing or facing discrimination or eviction. She co-authored briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and federal and state courts of appeals; authored comments to regulations issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Rural Housing Service and the Department of Justice; advised other legal services attorneys locally and nationally on affordable housing issues; and provided training to judges and other legal practitioners on affordable housing issues. These issues included the rights of persons with mental disabilities, immigrants, and persons who were limited in their English proficiency, to access the court system. She also started a family.
In May 2006, Tran declared her candidacy to challenge multimillionaire incumbent U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell in Washington State’s Democratic primary election. The differences are clear: Tran, a working mother, is known for her lifelong commitment to public service. Cantwell, who has a reputation for being aloof at best, has a background in business and is part of the big-money machine. Tran champions traditional Democratic working-class values and strongly opposes the war in Iraq. Cantwell’s positions on trade, Bush-administration appointments, and her support for the Iraq war has split the state party deeply.
Why is she taking on a such a well-financed incumbent? “I am running for U.S. Senate so I can make the laws I know we need. Simply put, I am applying for work in my area of expertise: federal legislation.”
In the years that she worked with federal legislation, Tran observed that, “The real power the Senate wields is that of accepting or refusing agency appointments, since agency heads not only prioritize which rules are written and published, they also decide where the agency will direct its enforcement efforts and what funding the agency will pursue in order to fulfill its objectives.”
For example, “Maria Cantwell supported and praised the Bush Administration’s Department of Interior appointment of Dirk Kempthorne, who received a 1% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters, opposes the very ‘Roadless Wilderness’ policies that are associated with Cantwell, and supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Yet she supported his appointment to the Department of Interior where he will have great influence over the direction of this nation’s environmental legislation.”
Tran’s positions on health care and trade policy have been deeply influenced by her memories of what it meant to be part of an immigrant family that came to this country with nothing. “My clients still need roofs over their heads and they need them today, not tomorrow. They need affordable housing, affordable healthcare, and good jobs right now.”
As for the war, “I haven’t forgotten that I owe my life to those sailors that plucked my family up out of a barge adrift at sea. I want to bring our troops home safe, and bring them home now. Every day our troops are in Iraq, more American and Iraqi lives are lost.” Tran strongly supports multilateral negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program. In contrast, Cantwell recently co-sponsored Republican Senator Rick Santorum’s so-called “Iran Freedom and Support Act,” which lays the groundwork for military intervention in Iran.
Tran delayed entering the primary race “because this was the soonest I was able as a working mother and sole provider of my family’s health-insurance coverage to begin to campaign full-time.” If multimillionaire Cantwell wins the primary, she will be facing multimillionaire Republican Mike McGavick in the November election. Undaunted by their war chests, Tran believes that, “People will vote for a candidate with sound ideas and sound values that can connect with them through substance, not just money alone. I am running this race as the mother of a working family because this is who I am and who I represent—Washington State’s working families.”
As Tran’s campaign attracts volunteers, donors, and media attention, the story of a child immigrant who landed on our shores running and never stopped is the story that has made this country a beacon to the world for over 250 years. If it ends in the Senate of the United States, it will be the dream ending of The Great American Classic.
You can learn more about Hong Tran and her campaign at
http://www.hongtran.com 
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