From the moment Vice President Kamala Harris swept onto stage in a cavernous hall at the George R. Brown Convention Center on Thursday morning, the audience was hers. Comprised of hundreds of members of the American Federation of Teachers, the crowd was on its feet, presenting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee with thunderous applause, and a sea of freshly printed Harris for President signs as they chanted her name.
Harris wasn’t originally slated to address the AFT, a union with more than 1.7 million members working in education, healthcare and government, during its four-day annual convention this week. But, then again, she also wasn’t originally expected to formally become the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate until last Sunday when President Joe Biden endorsed his vice president shortly (27 minutes, to be exact) after his announcement that he would not accept the nomination at the Democratic National Convention next month in Chicago.
In other words, it’s been a week of surprises, and, so far, Harris has handled every twist and turn like the political genius she just might be.
“It all happened so fast,” Nandi Riley, a college freshmen English teacher from Tallahasee, Florida, said.
Riley was already in Houston on Sunday when the news broke that Biden was stepping aside. “It’s thrilling. It feels like divine intervention,” she said. “I, of course, didn’t know when I got here on Sunday that Joe Biden would drop out and that Vice President Kamala Harris would be here and would be the nominee, but here we are.”
Many people came to the event wearing Biden-Harris signs, so the AFT organizers had stacks of Harris for President signs waiting in the hall. Going through check-in, one security official tensely explained that security was tighter than usual for this “because it happened so fast.”
Shortly after Biden endorsed the vice president, the AFT became the first union to officially back Harris, making a resolution on Sunday afternoon that union members ratified with roaring approval when the convention opened on Monday. Within hours of the union’s official endorsement, Riley was hearing rumors that Harris would make an appearance in Houston, a plan that was quickly confirmed on Tuesday.
Harris – who managed to corral enough Democratic delegate support to, barring any more surprises, win the Democratic nomination next month by Monday, and has raised more than $126 million in donations since Sunday – arrived in Houston on Wednesday afternoon, and didn’t waste a minute.
After landing at Ellington Field, Harris met with Houston Mayor John Whitmire (the two hadn’t met before) and Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis (he’s known Harris for years). From there, she zipped over zipped over to the Office of Emergency Management to get an update on Hurricane Beryl recovery efforts.
Ahead of the vice president’s address, the line for admittance to the convention hall stretched along the length of the George R. Brown Convention Center’s third floor, with hundreds of AFT attendees waiting to go through security.
“I stood in line for two hours and 15 minutes to make sure I’d get in and see her,” Terra Colgrove, an operating room nurse from Anchorage, Alaska, said. She noted that the media pen, which has been mostly empty all week, was packed on Thursday. “I feel like there’s a buzz, a different energy, because Kamala Harris was going to be here in the hall today.”
State Rep. Jolanda Jones managed to meet with the vice president before her keynote address, she said. Jones was full of praise for Harris who is now all-but-certainly being the top of the Democratic ticket. “I’m team Kamala all the way,” State Rep. Jolanda Jones said. “I was going to vote for Biden because I’m a good Democrat, but I was talking to my constituents, and they weren’t excited about President Biden. It’s another story with Vice President Harris on the ticket.”
And then, on Thursday morning, the vice president launched into what is technically known as a helluva good speech.
Harris started out recalling Biden’s oval office address on Wednesday night.
“Last night, our president addressed the nation, and he showed, once again, what true leadership looks like,” she said, praising Biden and threading a difficult needle. “He thinks and talks about his work in our country, understanding what it means in terms of what we do now and how that will impact the future. Over the past three-and-a-half years, and over his entire career, Joe has led with grace and strength and bold vision and deep compassion.”
Harris hit some of the same points she has been making since she went out to Harris campaign headquarters (formerly Biden’s campaign headquarters) in Wilmington, Delaware on Sunday. But she has already managed to sharpen that message since then.
As she addressed the AFT, Harris dug into her platform, touting her plans to forgive student loan debt, expand childcare access and back a strong public education system. She drew a stark comparison between her own platform and GOP plans, as they’ve been laid out in Project 2025.
The 900-page-long tome lays out what Republicans plan to do if former President Donald Trump is re-elected in November, including getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education and ending Head Start, the project that provides thousands of children across the country with free pre-kindergarten, Harris said.
(Trump has recently denied any knowledge of Project 2025.) “We want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books,” she said. “Can you imagine?”
She then deftly turned to the future, calling the presidential race a choice between two different visions of the United States. “We each in our country face a question, that question being, what kind of country do we want to live in? A country of compassion, freedom and the rule of law or a country of fear, chaos and hate?”
The AFT audience – the appearance was open to convention attendees and media only – responded with roaring approval, with people chanting her name and springing to their feet repeatedly throughout her speech and a final, giddy roar of approval as Harris wrapped up and ducked away, slipping offstage so quickly it seemed like she’d gone through a trapdoor. (She’s due back in Washington D.C. for a private meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later today.)
Clarence Reynolds, a retired U.S. history high school teacher who taught in New York City schools for years, sang Harris’ praises, saying, “She’s fantastic up there. She’s smart, she’s fierce and she’s ready to go.”
Mayra Segovia, a special education teacher in Houston ISD, was beaming after Harris finished up. “This is what we need,” she said. “The vice president is open to listening to what we at AFT need, what we teachers need. The opponent isn’t listening about anything.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
