From staffer to member: Vince Fong's road to Congress

WASHINGTON — When Vince Fong applied for his first congressional role, he could type about 75 words per minute, thanks to a high school class.

“I think that was probably the reason why I got it,” he said of his internship with Bill Thomas, the hard-charging California Republican who became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

One thing led to another, and before long he was helping Kevin McCarthy get elected to the House and then running his district office, watching his friend and mentor climb the ranks.

“People were used to Rep. Thomas being Ways and Means chairman, and so when Kevin came in, it was like, how are we going to ensure that our community has just as effective a voice?” Fong said.

He compares it to the time he hiked up Mount Whitney with McCarthy. “If you had to think of a metaphor of his rise to be speaker, it is that step by step, every moment, while there may be challenges, he was going to get everyone there.”

Now Fong holds the same seat as his two former bosses, earning McCarthy’s endorsement in a special election last year after McCarthy was ousted as speaker in a bitter intraparty battle and resigned.

“I want to serve my community, do the best I can, and when it’s time, then the next generation will rise to the occasion and do their part,” Fong said, describing “humility” as what’s missing in politics.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q: What are your earliest memories of politics?

A: I remember my father and my mother talking about the presidential election for Reagan in ’84, when I was just a kid. My family was not very political, but my dad read the newspaper every day, and he always handed me the front page.

I didn’t really get engaged politically until I got to college. My dad had emigrated from Hong Kong, came over to go to pharmacy school, and took a job at an independent pharmacy in Bakersfield. I think my mom wanted me to become a doctor, and so it came as a little bit of a surprise when I got the political bug. I went to UCLA, and the summer of my freshman year, I got an internship with Rep. Bill Thomas.

And then through the internship, I met Kevin McCarthy. He was district director at the time, and I answered his phones, I got his coffee. But he saw something in me that I probably didn’t see myself, and we stayed in contact.

Q: What do you do next?

A: I worked for Rep. Thomas again and did a summer fellowship in D.C., [among other things]. I was actually going to interview for jobs on the Hill after I finished my master’s, but a position was open in the district, so I returned back home and was his field representative and spokesman in the community. And then when Bill announced his retirement, Kevin calls me and says, “Hey, I’m going to run for Congress. Will you help run my campaign?”

Q: You went on to become McCarthy’s district director. What lessons did you take away from that?

A: I was very fortunate to have worked with someone like Rep. Thomas, who was at the pinnacle of his career, and then work for Kevin starting from the beginning and see him rise to where he got. And the advice he has always harped on and emphasized is, you never learn anything in the office. You gotta be out in the community. You want to be the first one in the room and the last one to leave. Decisions are made with or without you, and you gotta be in the room when those decisions are made.

[Democrats had won the House], so it was a difficult challenge: How do we remain a strong voice, not only as a new member, but also as someone who’s now serving in the minority?

For myself now, coming from the state legislature in California, I was in the super-minority, so this is my first experience in the majority. And so when people ask, “Why would you run for Congress with such a tight majority?” I always tell them, “Where I came from, this is what we dream about.”

Q: What moments stand out?

A: At the time, we were working on trying to get more attention on Valley Fever. It’s an orphan disease in our region in California, in the San Joaquin Valley, but it also impacts Arizona and the western United States. And so Kevin actually broached the idea with the CDC director and the NIH director to have a Valley Fever symposium, but to have it in Bakersfield — to bring our national leaders in health to an area that normally doesn’t get a lot of national attention.

I remember him calling me and saying, “Let’s make it happen.” And so we did a two-day symposium that, to this day, has sparked the Congressional Task Force on Valley Fever. Rep. [David] Schweikert is the co-chair of it, and now I’m the other co-chair. We’ve had significant investments, research and development-wise. We have potential new treatments on the horizon that are being tested, and all stemming [in part from that event in 2013.]

Q: How has Congress changed since you were first a staffer?

A: The people make this place go, and if you look at who was there at the time, it was members like Jim McCrery, Wally Herger, David Dreier, Dan Lungren. It was a different dynamic. The attention was on, how do we govern? Facebook was just getting started, and no one was out there trying to get a bunch of followers on social media.

[On the upside] members are now coming from all walks of life. I think the Congress has gotten younger, and there are a lot of us who are starting families. Elise Stefanik has shared some of her experiences raising her young son, Mike Lawler just recently had his second, and Addison McDowell is a freshman who has a young family. When I was running, I didn’t have a family, but now I’m going to have one, so that’s been exciting.

We also have a lot of members that are young, energetic and represent rural communities. Hopefully the voice of rural America will be showcased. People think the fights in Congress are Republican vs. Democrat, but a lot of times it’s urban vs. rural. I think the wildfires happening in California are tragic and heartbreaking, and we’re going to help Los Angeles. But for us in the rural communities, we’ve been dealing with wildfires for a very long time. Wildfires have ravaged our communities, and so now we have this opportunity to build some synergy between, how do we prevent a fire from happening in Los Angeles, as well as a fire happening in Fresno or Bakersfield or up in Northern California?

Q: You were in the state legislature before this for nearly eight years, but when you were younger, did you ever expect to end up in Congress?

A: I always say you serve for the time you’re blessed with, and you govern with humility. I do believe one characteristic that’s missing, not only in politics, but probably in society, is humility. And so I’m not here to be a social media influencer.

I never envisioned running for office. I thought I would stay as an adviser, work in the policy world. I mean, if you had met me as a little kid, I had a terrible stutter and was afraid of public speaking. I had some friends of mine that did speech and debate in high school, and so I decided to join them. My debate coach took it upon himself to help me overcome some of my personal challenges when it came to public speaking. And there’s my whole career — a lot of people who saw things in me that I didn’t see in myself, and encouraged me and challenged me to do things that were hard.