His parents sent him to a speech pathologist when he was in kindergarten, but it didn’t help much so he quit. He started worrying about his stutter in grade school when he lived in Scranton, Pa., he wrote. “It’s hard for people to know the difference between a normal word-finding error and stuttering,” she said.īiden was not available for an interview, but he discussed his speech impediment in his memoir, “Promises to Keep.” She hears verbal mistakes that anyone could make mixed with episodes of stuttering. Heather Grossman, director of the American Institute for Stuttering, has listened to Biden speeches, including his performance during last Thursday’s Democratic debate in Houston. “We are thought to have serious emotional problems.” “We are thought to be slow-witted,” Biden said in the 2008 speech. Trump’s jab pointed to what Biden has described as unfounded prejudices against people with speech impediments. When Biden had a slip of the tongue that made it sound prematurely like he was a candidate, Trump pounced on Twitter, and called him “tongue tied” and “another low I.Q. Trump picked on Biden over verbal stumbles even before the Democrat formally announced his candidacy.
Late-night host Trevor Noah joked about the Pittsburgh speech that Biden “was a little out of practice when it came to saying words.” A conservative website, the, posted video clips of his stammering and headlined it “Peter Piper Picked a President.” Experts on stuttering who follow him closely say they have noticed it on several occasions during the campaign, such as an interview on “The View” when he addressed complaints about his tendency to touch and hug women while campaigning, and an April speech in Pittsburgh launching his campaign, when he struggled with words. According to the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders, most children outgrow their stutter, but for 25% of them, stuttering is a lifelong challenge.īiden has overcome the serious stutter of his youth, but remnants of it resurface on occasions such as when he is very tired, he said in a 2016 speech. “Joe’s stuttering, I think, is one of the principal reasons - a major, major, major reason - that he is the good and compassionate and kind man that he is.”Ībout 3 million Americans suffer from the speech impediment of stuttering, marked by involuntary repetition of sounds, syllables or words. “Trump is a bully, and Joe has been standing up to bullies his entire life,” Owens said in an interview. Valerie Biden Owens, the former vice president’s younger sister, says that one lasting impact of his childhood stutter is that it has given him more empathy and compassion for others’ trials, and it uniquely equips him to handle Trump’s taunts. Joe Biden doubles down on his argument that he is the Democrats’ best bet to take on President Trump, but there are risks to that strategy. The promise and peril of Joe Biden’s front-runner campaign
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