In address, Biden quoted Emmaus business owner
President noted Kirsten Hess just wanted ‘the truth’
Kirsten Hess wasn’t watching President Joe Biden’s primetime address Thursday marking one year of the coronavirus pandemic. But she got about 20 text messages telling her to turn on the TV.
“Last summer, I was in Philadelphia and I met a small-business owner, a woman,” Biden said. “I asked her, I said, ‘What do you need most?’ Never forget what she said to me. She said, looking me right in the eye and she said, ‘I just want the truth. The truth. Just tell me the truth.’ ”
Hess, owner of Let’s Play Books in Emmaus, said late Thursday that Biden was describing their interaction at a campaign event in June. A Philadelphia Inquirer reporter attended the event, which was actually at a restaurant in Yeadon, just west of Philadelphia. Hess said it was also broadcast on TV at the time, which is how friends watching Thursday’s address knew Biden was talking about her.
“He was directly across the table and he said specifically, ‘What are you looking for from your government?’ ” Hess, 50, recalled Thursday night from her home in Emmaus. “And I believe I said, ‘The truth. I want clear consistent language so that business owners and others can make smart decisions.’ ”
So it was an exciting moment Thursday realizing she’d been sort-of name-dropped by the president — even if Biden didn’t use her name.
“I’m a little giddy to be honest with you,” Hess said. “The fact
that maybe my five minutes or 10 minutes ... with him actually resonated makes me feel really proud.”
She was joined that day by a caterer from Swarthmore and the owners of Carletta’s Hideaway, a soul food restaurant in Yeadon. They sat socially distanced around an outdoor
table as a crush of journalists documented their hourlong conversation with Biden. It was one of several events Biden did in the Philadelphia area over the summer, and many more in Pennsylvania over the course of the fall, as his campaign zeroed in on the critical swing state that would eventually lift him to the
White House.
“It was so difficult as a small-business owner to make decisions and it was a rough fall,” Hess said Thursday. “It’s been a much better spring already because I do feel like we get the kind of information that we need and I can plan accordingly.”
Hess has managed to keep her bookstore afloat despite a tough year. She didn’t get a Paycheck Protection Program loan. She had to lay off her whole staff, except her 16-year-old daughter. While her immediate family stayed healthy, she said she knows five people who have died from the virus just in the last two months.
“If we’d had clear and measured language and our last administration had told the truth about this virus, we wouldn’t have nearly as many people dead,” she said.
Hess isn’t sure how she came to be invited to the campaign event that day. She thinks her congresswoman, Democrat Susan Wild, may have recommended her.
She wasn’t a Biden fan before then, but she left a supporter.
“I believed he was too old,” Hess said. “I believed he didn’t really want to run and he felt compelled to, But when I met him, that changed my mind . ... He spoke to us directly, he didn’t have cue cards and I left there with an idea that I was sold that he could run this country.”
This isn’t the first time the June 17 campaign event has thrust Hess into the limelight.
Then-President Donald Trump tweeted out an image of her husband and daughter attending a speech Biden gave later in the day. The event, held inside a Darby Township municipal building, had limited capacity due to COVID-19, and Trump mocked the sparse auditorium.
“Joe Biden’s rally. ZERO enthusiasm!” Trump said on Twitter.
After Biden suspended in-person campaigning at the outset of the pandemic, the Yeadon event — and Trump’s reaction to it — was one of the early signs of how the two candidates would run very different coronavirus campaigns.
Trump’s tweet used to bother Hess but it feels different now, with Biden in office and Trump suspended from Twitter.
“All I can say,” Hess said Thursday, “is what a difference a year can make.”