WASHINGTON — One of Joe Biden’s proudest childhood accomplishments was a five-minute speech to his all-boys Catholic high school in Delaware.
The assignment was routine — a public-speaking requirement for all students. But for Biden, it was a triumph in a long struggle to overcome a debilitating stutter.
That struggle led him to brawl with schoolyard bullies, to memorize and recite Irish poetry, and to witness his mother threaten a nun who had humiliated him.
Six decades later, as Biden campaigns for president with his trademark long-winded oratory, few voters would guess he was ever at a loss for words. But he has referred to his struggle with stuttering as “the single most defining thing in [his] life.”
Speech experts say his history of stuttering does not explain all of Biden’s verbal oddities — it does not account for attention-grabbing gaffes such as mixing up Vermont and New Hampshire or misnaming the location of two mass shootings. But he does continue to stutter — at times in ways that are noticeable only to a trained ear, but sometimes obvious enough that he has been derided by detractors, including President Trump.
And the stutter, the experts say, may contribute to his renowned verbosity.
Link: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-09-15/joe-bidens-childhood-struggle-with-a-stutter