Mia Love is a symbol. And in politics, that’s not necessarily a pejorative or a bad thing, because politics is about symbols, good as well as bad.

If elected to Congress from Utah’s new 4th District, Love would become the first black woman Republican to hold a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. She also is an LDS woman, the mayor of a small Utah suburban town and the daughter of Haitian immigrants, so she fills multiple symbolic roles, most of them about diversity and aspiration.
That’s why she was invited to address the Republican National Convention Tuesday evening, a convention that has nominated another Mormon, Mitt Romney, to be its presidential candidate.

Her speech, 'The America I Know,' was brief, only about three minutes, preceded by a campaign video that introduced her to the convention. But she packed a load of Republican catch phrases and positive rhetoric about the American dream into it, and she knows how to deliver a line. She varied her pace, speeding up to build tension before coming down hard to punch home a theme.
It was a solid performance that energized the crowd on the convention floor, and it confirmed for a national television audience what delegates to the Republican state convention learned earlier this year: Mia Love is a poised, articulate, animated speaker and a formidable candidate.

As she does on the campaign trail, she told the convention about how her parents arrived .