Progress sometimes comes in quietly. Or as they say in North Carolina, on kitten’s paws.  Other times it’s a dramatic, “Wow!” “Wow” is what I have to say after reading about Mia Love. What’s not to love about her story? The daughter of Haitian immigrants who arrived in the United States with ten dollars in their pockets, Mia Love just crushed the competition to get her party’s nomination to run for Congress. “There are a lot of people who have tried to define me as a person,” Love told CNN’s Kyra Phillips in an interview. “I’m not a victim, and I don’t allow anybody to put me in a box.” Love that, Mia!

A marathon running mother of three, Love got into politics, when she ran for city council in her small town, and got elected Mayor shortly afterwards. She managed 1700% population growth and helped make drastic budget cuts, eliminating jobs even though she knew she would likely be seeing a lot of the people who had just been laid off at the grocery store or in church. That’s tough love. But it worked.  And she was able to slash budgets while funding new city services that the town required as its population swelled. She did it by getting creative.

If elected, Love will be the first Afro-Haitian American Republican congresswoman. She’s also a Mormon. For goodness sake, her name is Mia Love. Clearly she is different. And different is not always a bad thing! Of course, I do wish she was pro-choice and don’t know where she stands on civil unions but it is refreshing to see this kind of diversity within the party. At the end of the day she is all for freeing up the reigns of our economy and letting business lead the charge toward a recovery. That’s why budget chairman Paul Ryan endorsed her.

You may agree that the timing of another article that I came across in this morning’s New York Times is a little suspect.  The paper profiles an African-American Mormon mom from Utah who is leaning towards Obama. It does raise the conflict that some African-Americans may feel voting against the first black president. I did think it was funny when the woman profiled in the NYT story said the following joke is now circulating around the African-American Mormon community in Utah, “Mr. Obama calls Mr. Romney to say he thinks it is time the country had a Mormon president. But just as Mr. Romney is thanking the president for the apparent concession, Mr. Obama interrupts him to say, “My baptism is on Saturday.”

Here are some suggestions if you wanted to learn more about Love:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/mia-love-black-conservative-mormon-gop-house-candidate/story?id=16203847#.T7zn579qMlU

http://www.love4utah.com/about1