Stuttering Through It

Read: What Joe Biden can’t bring himself to say

Consider the emotional maturity it takes at Brayden’s age to talk about his personal struggle—let alone when that personal struggle is talking, when it’s hard to even talk at all, when it hurts to speak.

Like Biden, Brayden’s eyes drifted from the camera when he began to stutter. As kids, most stutterers develop a habit of looking down at the floor during a segment of severe disfluency. This is partly a manifestation of shame that comes over time; after a while, you don’t want to look into the eyes of the person giving you the look, that pity, that subtle recoil. But Brayden never hung his head. His stutters and blocks were mild, extremely mild, on the broad spectrum of stuttering. But even that’s not the point. Brayden’s fluency, or disfluency, is not what you or I or any viewer tonight should judge him on.

He stood up and delivered his speech, and stuttered through it, and said all the words he wanted to say. He told a powerful story in just over two minutes, which is more than some other DNC speakers can claim.

Read: Barack Obama is scared

Biden stuttered tonight, too, but that’s not the point, either. Countless pundits swooped across cable news airwaves and Twitter, instantly declaring this the best speech of Biden’s campaign, if not his career. He mostly said the same things he’s been saying all along: that America is lost and he believes it can be found. His message was more hopeful and unifying than the one Barack Obama delivered the night before. Biden wasn’t speaking to an arena of thousands, as he’d long dreamed, but he still captured what Richard Ben Cramer dubbed The Connect. Like Brayden, he faced the pain of the moment and told Americans the truth.

I interviewed Biden almost exactly a year ago. I stuttered like hell through every question, sweating through my suit, dropping my head, jerking my neck, looking far less composed than Brayden looked this evening. As I left Biden’s office that afternoon, I don’t know if I ever thought he’d be up there tonight. As I’m writing this, I don’t know if I believe he’ll win the election. I just can’t stop thinking about Brayden’s triumph.

John Hendrickson is a senior editor on The Atlantic’s politics team.