I was visiting the area to get fitted for the newly-developed product designed to help stutterers. The video is likely deep in the station’s archives collecting dust. area, you’d believe the severe stutter I’ve dealt with for most of my life-which I spoke about at Nieman’s 80th anniversary gathering in 2018-had been magically cured by something called the “SpeechEasy.”
If you only knew me from a short local TV news piece done about 25 years ago in the Greenville, S.C. Journalists who don’t know this history or don’t take the time to understand the complexity of the speech disorder will likely inadvertently mislead their audiences during any discussion about Biden’s mental capabilities. Biden wrote a letter for National Stuttering Awareness week in 2015 for the National Stuttering Foundation and mentors young people who struggle with their speech. Words beginning with “s” were particularly difficult when he was growing up, Biden told The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson, who also stutters. I also know why it is easy for anyone to point to a few clips of Biden to make a seemingly compelling yet misleading case that his verbal stumbles are really about cognitive problems.īiden has spoken openly about his stutter, which he’s struggled with since childhood, only occasionally. I can say with certainty that what you are seeing of Biden during debates and on the stump can plausibly be explained by his lifelong battle with stuttering. I can’t say with any certainty whether Joe Biden, the current front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, is in “cognitive decline,” as many journalists and critics have begun to ponder aloud. that is not something they're able to overcome just by saying, 'I'm not going to do that.Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during a Democratic presidential primary debate in Las Vegas in February
Because it gave me an insight that I don't know that I would have ever had before, that everybody has something. But in the long run, Biden said, the experience was "maybe the best thing that ever happened to me."I remember stuttering when I had to speak publicly, when I had to stand up and read. But I haven't seen any evidence of that.”īiden did talk about the embarrassment he faced as a child because of his stutter. He said his age isn't to blame, claiming he’s operating at "110%" of the mental skills he had when he was vice president - "better than I was." But Biden dismissed those as a meaningless media obsession.He referred to the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, as taking place in Houston and Michigan, and he said he met with the Parkland high school students as vice president when that mass shooting happened after he left office. Sometimes, Biden said, "I'll find myself searching for a second" to find the words - but "I've always attributed that to being tired and not to the stutter."īiden has had a number of verbal stumbles during the campaign.That doesn't cross my mind that I'm stuttering,” Biden said. “Look, the mistakes I make are mistakes.
“I don't think of myself as continuing to stutter. But in the "Axios on HBO" interview, Biden said that's not how he sees it. The piece suggested that Biden's boyhood stutter, which he has talked about throughout his political career, is still with him.Why it matters: A reporter for The Atlantic who stutters wrote recently that he studied Biden’s verbal miscues and concluded that lifelong stuttering struggles were to blame. Former Vice President Joe Biden told "Axios on HBO" that stuttering isn't to blame for a string of verbal mistakes in the 2020 campaign.