NORRISTOWN – With just hours until Election Day, former first lady Michelle Obama asked Pennsylvanians to support Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris.
On Saturday, she joined other speakers, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-4), sharpening the contrast between Harris and GOP candidate Donald Trump and their agendas.
Dean said Trump and Ohio’s Republican vice presidential candidate, Sen. J.D. Vance, are “unfit, unqualified” and “un-American.”
– But you know what? she said. “This is not 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 support. “Kamala’s presidency will have a positive and profound impact on all of our lives,” Obama told the crowd Saturday in the Norristown High School gymnasium.
“Instead of someone who does it only for himself, we will have a president who does it for you. Instead of someone who will accelerate the dismantling of the women’s reproductive health system, we will have a president who believes in our freedom make decisions about your own body” she said. “Instead of A criminal and perpetrators of violence, we can have a president who prosecutes lawbreakers and protects victims. Instead of someone who gets along with dictators and denies the election“We will have a president who will work to strengthen and expand our democracy, all with warmth, joy and grace.”
Obama is campaigning for Harris in Pittsburgh, kicking off the battleground state campaign
Obama said the most profound impact of a Harris presidency “will be felt by our children and grandchildren.
“They deserve a leader who exemplifies the absolute best that America has to offer. They deserve someone they can respect and emulate; someone who will teach them compassion, empathy and responsibility; someone who doesn’t feel big by making others feel small; someone who invites them to experience the beauty and possibilities of this country. Our children deserve to grow up under the extraordinary leadership of Kamala Harris.”
On Saturday, more than 4,000 people packed the gymnasium to hear speeches by Obama and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, according to the Harris campaign. Thousands more were turned away because the school was full.
Many of the people who arrived lined up early in the morning to make sure they got a spot. They sat close together on the gymnasium’s blue and white bleachers and laughed, sang along to popular Taylor Swift and Keys songs, and danced to classic songs like “Hit the Road, Jack.”
This isn’t some dystopian Netflix show I’m talking about. This is the platform on which the other side operates.
“We love you!” they screamed when Keys took the stage, and later when Obama took the stage.
Both Keys and Obama called Trump merely an “anti-Kamala,” with Keys stating that “his name doesn’t deserve to be spoken out of my mouth.”
Keys has stated that she believes that “our voice is a precious gift of love that we give to ourselves.”
She talked about the rights women have gained since the 1970s and how tough women fought for them – equal access to higher education, having credit cards in their own name, access to abortion care.
“They are already starting to take away these rights,” Keys said. “If this has already been done in Roe v. Wade, which makes us think that there can’t be a leader on the other side who would say ‘forget equal pay, women don’t need it’ or ‘we don’t'” no longer educate women, they can just stay at home, they don’t work anyway. This isn’t some dystopian Netflix show I’m talking about. This is the platform on which the other side operates. They want to turn back time, but I want to ask, are we going back?”
The crowd chanted Harris’s constant campaign refrain: “We’re not coming back.”
Keys said Trump and his supporters want to take away women’s right to vote.
She talked video – former Trump adviser and Project 2025 adviser John McEntee posted on Twitter, stating: “when we said we wanted only mail-in voting, we had a MAN in mind.” The text attached to the video reads: “Maybe the 19th will have to go.”
“He said, ‘Oh, it’s just a joke.’ But it’s not a joke because it’s not entertaining,” Keys said. “And I haven’t laughed at any of the things these jokers say yet.”
She told the audience that their votes mattered.
“Your vote counts just as much as the vote of any other billionaire. In fact, it matters more because there are more of us,” she said. Keys’ personal estate estimated at $75 million.
“If you don’t vote for [Harris] or you don’t vote at all, you vote for chaos and hatred, you vote 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 changes we want, especially by voting up and down, so she can have the team and support she needs.”
Obama said Harris’ campaign reminded her of her husband’s campaign and recalled her time spent on the campaign and in the White House.
She said she saw “every glorious, discordant gradient of the American spectrum.”
“Looking back, what stands out most about that time was the basic kindness we found in the people we encountered everywhere,” she said. “It didn’t matter whether people were excited and ready to ride or if they were accelerating in the opposite direction. It didn’t matter if they looked like us, talked like us, or voted like us.
She said she always felt there was “something real, something fundamental” that held America together – a shared set of values.
“Listen, people, we don’t always get it right, but here in America, we rise more often than we fall,” she said.
“And yet, for much of this election cycle, we have been inundated with voices and forces that tell us a different story about who we are. People who tell us that things may not be as they seem. That we should be suspicious of our neighbors. This military service and sacrifice is for suckers. That there is an enemy inside.”
She referred to Trump’s remarks during his presidency AND on the campaign trail this election cycle.
She called his rhetoric “bewildering,” “dangerous” and “disgraceful.”
‘Hope Returns’: Obamas Support Kamala Harris
Obama acknowledged that change in America comes slowly and in some cases takes generations.
“You can spend a lifetime carefully and meticulously building something brick by brick, but all it takes is one big wave, one strong gust of wind, and all your effort can be undone in an instant,” she said. “That’s what this election is about.”
She called Trump “a little man trying to feel big by pouring gasoline on other people’s real pain, anger and fear.”
“We need leaders who connect with people’s pain and address systemic problems at their root, not leaders who stoke our fear and focus our rage on each other,” Obama said. “See, because when you open a can of gasoline, you wink at hate and think it’s normal to call someone “bimbo‘ Or ‘low IQ‘ Or ‘human scum“Listen, you can’t control how fast and how far this fire of hate will spread. Suddenly someone dared to say that our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico come from “garbage island.’ Suddenly people say that he is a political opponent Antichrist. Suddenly there are people marching with torchesramming crowds of peaceful protesters with their cars, marching on our nation’s Capitol to overturn a free and fair election.”
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Obama described Trump and his agenda as a destructive force.
“The destruction is swift and merciless, and you never know where it will stop,” she said. “One day it will come for people you have never met. Maybe it’s immigrants, or Black people, or the trans community. Then he comes for a neighbor, a friend, a family member who is Puerto Rican, Jewish or Palestinian. But then it will come for you.
If Trump wins, Obama said, his “retrospective vision” will “infect the lives of all of us.”
She said Trump wants to abolish the Department of Education, “gut the women’s health care system” and prioritize “the people at the top above everyone else.” She said Americans will also feel the impact of Trump’s presidency in “less concrete” ways – “in racist chants at high school sporting events, in neighbors who won’t make eye contact because of politics, in walking down streets that seem more threatening because you look, love, or speak a little differently.
This election, Obama said, offers “a chance to move beyond this decade of threatening, topsy-turvy thinking, beyond the constant noise of constant resentment and hatred, and do the work of building a more energetic and inclusive America. But we can only do this if we elect a president who has all of our best interests at heart, someone who has the character, strength and intellect to lead us through all the real challenges we face, someone who can spark open and inclusive society with the spirit of the next generation, someone who can confirm everything we tell them – that everyone is critical, that the future is not to be feared but to be embraced.”
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