Former first lady Michelle Obama campaigns for Vice President Kamala Harris at Norristown High School Nov. 2, 2024 (Photo by Christina Kristofic for the Capital-Star)
NORRISTOWN — With hours to go until Election Day, former first lady Michelle Obama made a plea to Pennsylvanians to support Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris.
She joined other speakers, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-4th District), on Saturday in sharpening the contrast between Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump and their platforms.
Dean said Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance are “unfit, unqualified” and “un-American.”
“But you know what?” she said. “This isn’t just a vote against horror. This is a vote for something spectacular.”
Obama and her husband, former President Barack Obama, have been friends with Harris since his first presidential campaign, when Harris offered her early support. “Kamala’s presidency will positively and profoundly affect all of our lives,” Obama told the capacity crowd gathered Norristown High School gymnasium on Saturday.
“Instead of someone who’s only in it for themselves, we will have a president who’s in it for you. Instead of someone who’d accelerate the dismantling of our women’s reproductive health system, we will have a president who believes in our freedom to make decisions about our own bodies.” she said. “Instead of a criminal and an abuser, we can have a president who has prosecuted law breakers and protected victims. Instead of someone who cozies up to dictators and denies elections, we will have a president who will work to strengthen and expand our democracy, and do it all with warmth, joy and grace.”
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The most profound impact of a Harris presidency, Obama said, “will be felt by our children and grandchildren.
“They deserve a leader who serves as an example of the absolute best America has to offer. They deserve someone they can respect and emulate; someone who will teach them compassion, empathy and accountability; someone who doesn’t make themselves feel big by making others feel small; someone who invites them in to experience all the beauty and possibility of this country. Our children deserve to grow up with the extraordinary leadership of Kamala Harris.”
More than 4,000 people had gathered in the gymnasium and overflowed into its auditorium Saturday to hear Obama and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Alicia Keys speak, the Harris campaign reported. Thousands more were turned away because the school was at maximum capacity.
Many of the folks who made it in had lined up early in the morning to make sure they’d get a seat. They sat close together on the blue and white gym bleachers, and laughed, sang along to popular songs by Taylor Swift and Keys, and danced to classic tunes like “Hit the Road, Jack.”
This is not some dystopian Netflix show that I’m talking about. This is the platform the other side is running on.
– Alicia Keys
“We love you!” they shouted when Keys took the stage, and again later when Obama took the stage.
Both Keys and Obama referred to Trump only as “Kamala’s opponent,” with Keys saying “his name does not deserve to be spoken out of my mouth.”
Keys said she believes “our vote is a precious gift of love that we give to each other.”
She talked about the rights women have gained since the 1970s and how hard women fought to get them — to have equal access to higher education, to have credit cards in their own name, to have access to abortion care.
“They’re already starting to take those rights away,” Keys said. “If it’s been done already with Roe vs. Wade, what makes us think that there couldn’t be a leader in place from the other side that would say ‘forget equal pay, women don’t need it’ or ‘we don’t need to educate women anymore, they can just stay at home, they don’t work anyway.’ This is not some dystopian Netflix show that I’m talking about. This is the platform the other side is running on. They want to turn back the clock, but I want to ask you, are we going back?”
The crowd chanted the constant refrain of the Harris campaign: “We are not going back.”
Keys said Trump and his supporters want to take away women’s right to vote.
She talked about a video that former Trump aide and Project 2025 advisor John McEntee posted on Twitter, in which he says, “when we said we wanted mail-only voting, we meant male M-A-L-E.” The text accompanying the video says “the 19th might have to go.”
“He said, ‘oh, it’s just a joke.’ But it’s not a joke because it ain’t funny,” Keys said. “And I have yet to laugh at any one of these things these jokers say.”
She told the crowd that their votes matter.
“Your vote counts just as much as any of these other billionaires. In fact, it matters more because there’s more of us,” she said. Keys’ personal net worth is estimated to be $75 million.
“If you don’t vote for [Harris] or you don’t vote at all, you’re voting for the chaos and the hate, you’re voting for a cruel tomorrow for immigrants, people of color, women, girls, our children and our planet. Let’s give Kamala the power to make the change we want to see, especially by voting up and down the ballot so she can have the team and the support that she needs.”
Obama said Harris’ campaign reminded her of her husband’s, and reminisced about their time on the campaign trail and in the White House.
She said she saw “every gorgeous discordant gradient of the American spectrum.”
“Looking back, what stands out most of anything during that time is the fundamental goodness we encountered in folks we met everywhere we went,” she said. “It didn’t matter if folks were fired up and ready to go or speeding off in the other direction. It didn’t matter if they looked like us, or talked like us, or voted like us.”
She said she always felt like there was “something true, something fundamental” that held America together — a shared set of values.
“Look, folks, we don’t always get it right, but here in America, we rise more than we fall, y’all,” she said.
“And yet, for so much of this election cycle, we have been inundated with voices and forces that tell us another story about who we are. The folks telling us that things may not be as they appear. That we should be suspicious of our neighbors. That military service and sacrifice is for suckers. That there’s an enemy from within.”
She was referring to remarks Trump made during his presidency and on the campaign trail in this election cycle.
She called his rhetoric “bewildering,” “dangerous,” and “shameful.”
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Obama acknowledged that change has been slow in America, and in some cases, has taken generations.
“You can spend a lifetime carefully and painstakingly constructing something brick by brick, but it takes only one big wave, one strong gust of wind and all your efforts can be swept away in an instant,” she said. “That’s what’s at stake in this election.”
She referred to Trump as “a small man trying to make himself feel big by pouring gasoline on other people’s genuine pain, and anger and fear.”
“We need leaders who will connect with people’s pain and address the systemic issues at their root, not leaders who stoke our fears and focus our fury on one another,” Obama said. “See because once you open up that gasoline can, once you wink at hate and make it normal to call somebody a ‘bimbo’ or ‘low-IQ’ or ‘human scum,’ look, you cannot control how fast and how far that fire of hate will spread. All of a sudden, someone feels emboldened to say that our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico come from an ‘island of garbage.’ All of a sudden, folks are saying a political opponent is the antichrist. All of a sudden, folks are marching with torches, ramming cars through crowds of peaceful protesters, marching on our nation’s Capitol to overturn a free and fair election.”
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Obama referred to Trump and his agenda as a destructive force.
“Destruction is swift and it is merciless and you never know where it will stop,” she said. “One day, it’s coming for folks you’ve never met. Maybe it’s immigrants or Black people or the trans community. Then, it’s coming for a neighbor, a friend, a family member who’s Puerto Rican or Jewish or Palestinian. But then it’s coming for you.”
If Trump wins, Obama said, his “backwards vision” will “infect all of our lives.”
She said Trump wants to dismantle the Department of Education, “gut the women’s health system” and prioritize “those at the top over everybody else.” She said Americans would also feel the impact of a Trump presidency in “less concrete” ways — “in the racist chants at high school sporting events, the neighbors who won’t make eye contact because of politics, the walks down the street that feel more dangerous because you look or love or talk a little differently.”
This election, Obama said, offers “a chance to start moving beyond this decade of dangerous, upside-down thinking, beyond the constant buzz of constant rancor and hate, and do that work of building a more vibrant and inclusive America. Yet we can do that only if we elect a president who has all of our best interests at heart, someone with the character and the strength and intellect to lead us through all the very real challenges we face, someone who can ignite the open and inclusive spirit of the next generation, someone who can reaffirm all those things we tell them — that everyone is important, that the future is something not to be feared but embraced.”
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