Thoughts on Joe Biden

I have had the opportunity to speak personally with @joebiden twice. When we lived on Nantucket and he was Vice President, he would come every year for Thanksgiving and he always went to eat at Chris’ restaurant once during the trip. Chris has cooked for a good number of celebrities and political figures (even spent a week as a personal chef on a hunting trip with Dick Cheney and several 4 star generals), and VP Biden was always one of his favorite – because Biden is a genuinely nice person to everyone, including people in the service industry (which was frequently not the case with his peers). The first time I met VP Biden was briefly in 2010. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking a picture and he very kindly obliged. The following Thanksgiving, in 2011, I spoke with him outside Chris’ restaurant and I shared with him my frustrations as a young woman trying to start a business and struggling to come up with the necessary capital. I still had a ton of student loans and I was feeling really discouraged because I had worked incredibly hard to write a business plan and was unable to secure funding. The bank had told me they wouldn’t give me a loan, I didn’t have any luck finding an angel investor on island, and crowd funding was really only for nonprofits or creative ventures at that point. After speaking with him, I handed him a copy of the photo from the previous year and a letter that better detailed my challengers as a young female entrepreneur. VP Biden kindly listened to me and then asked if I wanted to take another picture for Nora’s baby book. I wasn’t going to ask again, but since he offered, I said yes. The following January, I was surprised to find a letter from him in the mail. Many politicians might have set my letter aside and forgotten about it. They would have probably thrown away the picture of them with a random constituent they didn’t know. But not Biden. He autographed the picture for Nora’s baby book and he sent my letter onto the SBA to see if they could help me get my business off the ground. Not only did he hear me, but he actually took action to help. That’s the kind of guy Joe Biden is. #votebiden