US election 2020: Biden may stutter, but he’s not stumbling

The young Joe Biden’s ability to grab hold of his listeners by the sheer power of his words was once the stuff of Washington legend.

Joe Biden, here at a rally in Flint, Michigan, has located a measured, empathetic tone that contrasts favourably with his opponent’s bombast. Picture: AFP

The young Joe Biden’s ability to grab hold of his listeners by the sheer power of his words was once the stuff of Washington legend.

“Joe would get to talking fast, with conviction — something near joy in his voice — and he’d haul them along, until they could feel his belief like a hand on their backs, until they could see it as he could, until the thing was shining in the air,” wrote the journalist Richard Ben Cramer in his classic history of the 1988 presidential campaign What It Takes.

“You could feel the thing happen in the room — the ‘connect’. People called it the Biden Rush.”

Nobody is talking about the Biden Rush any more. If the former vice president, 77, wins the White House it won’t be because he overwhelmed his campaign opponents with stirring rhetoric.

When he opens his mouth in public these days his supporters are just hoping that he will limit his characteristic vocal stumbles enough to debunk Donald Trump’s unfounded slur that “Sleepy Joe” has dementia.

Most, but not all, of the time, he clears that low bar. Speech experts say that his barely perceptible stutter holds the key to many of his verbal struggles. Although Mr Biden likes to claim that he has overcome his childhood speech impediment there is ample evidence that he “still stutters”, says Gerald Maguire, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the University of California Riverside School of Medicine. The proof includes “hesitations”, “blinking”, momentary “anxiety”, “avoidance of words” and “word substitutions”.

Spontaneous speaking for a stutterer “is mentally exhausting” and can easily lead to the speaker inserting the wrong word at the wrong moment, said Dr Maguire, who is also chairman of the National Stuttering Association.

That happens a lot with Mr Biden. His innumerable blunders along the campaign trail have included mixing up Vermont with New Hampshire, arguing that “poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids” and saying that 200 million Americans had died from coronavirus when he meant to say 200,000.

In the second presidential debate he spoiled an effective attack on Mr Trump as “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history” by referring to the right-wing militants that the President refused to disavow as the “Poor Boys” rather than the “Proud Boys”.

Last week, he tripped up in an interview when he warned against “four more years of George, er, George”. The Republican Party’s rapid response director tweeted it out, suggesting that Mr Biden had confused Mr Trump with George W Bush (he omitted the crucial detail that the interviewer was the actor George Lopez).

In the early stages of the campaign, Mr Biden seemed listless and longwinded. At televised debates he looked stiff, frustrated and diminished. He generated none of the excitement of his rivals in the race for the Democratic nomination and he slumped to humiliating defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire.

I saw him at a barbecue in Las Vegas just before the next contest, the Nevada caucuses. His remarks, to a friendly audience of firefighters, union workers and activists, mixed moments of fluency with awkward pauses where he corrected himself. He seemed weary and lacking in conviction.

But, as Mr Biden is fond of saying, here’s the deal: the next day he scraped a second-place finish that saved his campaign. He delivered a short speech, in another union building, that was crisp, defiant and full of vigour. Someone shouted “The Comeback Kid!” (a reference to Bill Clinton’s rebound from near disaster in 1992) and Biden flashed his movie-star smile and shot back: “You got it!” Confidence surging through him, he added: “We are alive and we’re coming back and we’re gonna win!”

Since then the pandemic has thinned his schedule and provided an opportunity for him to rest, hone his thoughts and refine his approach. Lately he has been far more impressive and dynamic.

He speaks in chopped, plain-spoken sentences that punch home his campaign messages and help him to manage the stutter that he has called “the single most defining thing in my life”.

He has also located a measured, empathetic tone that contrasts favourably with his opponent’s bombast. Perhaps he never needed the Biden Rush after all.

The Times