Ivanka Trump gave a truly impressive speech at the Republican National Convention. She came across as competent, credible, sensible and strong.
As I write this, I have my 11-month-old in my office with me, as I rush to finish my work before the weekend. My husband is out of town and I have Navy Reserve duty tomorrow. My babysitter missed a day this week because she was sick.
For millennial women, who are the new generation of moms and workers, balancing everything is hard. And Ivanka spoke directly to me.
I know some conservatives were irritated that Ivanka spoke about “equal pay for equal work.” But she didn’t do it the way Democrats do. She didn’t blame it on discrimination. She spoke directly to the actual cause of the pay gap: the time women take off from work to be moms.
And she didn’t tell me that I needed the government to save me. She told me that her father, Donald Trump, had set the example in his business, and that he would make it easier for other entrepreneurs to do the same.
There was so much else to like in her speech. Her grammar — sorry, I am a bit of a stickler — was polished, the first grammatically correct political speech I have heard in a long time.
She told the kind of stories about her dad that I like to tell about my own mother, the things parents do for other people when no one is looking. Like the time my own, exceptionally generous, mother went out in a rainstorm and bought every newspaper that a vendor was selling on the street so he could go home.
Ivanka talked about her father’s generosity. She described him as “the father who raised me.” She recalled sitting in his office and playing with toy buildings as he made real ones.
And that made a particular impression on me because I know that in many mixed or divorced families, especially where there are children from different parents, kids don’t always have the best feelings about their fathers. It was reassuring to see how much Ivanka and her siblings love their father, how they work with him and vouch for him. That is rare in families, especially political families.
She punctured the caricature of Trump the monster, the fascist, the buffoon being described by the media and Trump-haters.
I think Ivanka’s speech will have encouraged skeptics — especially my Facebook friends — to give her father a second look.