They called him B-biden

By Barry Yeoman
The Independent Weekly / August 27, 2008

I was walking to the Pepsi Center in Denver this week, talking with a former public official from Illinois. The conversation turned to Sen. Joe Biden. “I have a personal question,” she said to me. “You don’t have to answer it. Do you think the fact that Biden began life stuttering causes him to compensate by talking a lot?”

It was not unreasonable question: My stutter is often the first thing strangers notice about me. It short-circuits my speech and causes me to jerk my head when I’m trying to look like a competent professional. While stuttering forces some people into painful introversion, it also launches many of us into the hard work of self-acceptance. Eventually for us, talking becomes an act of liberation.

For stutterers, tonight is our moment on the national stage. Although Biden’s speech impediment started abating in high school and pretty much disappeared in college, it is now a part of his public biography. “They called him B-b-biden,” Barack Obama said when he introduced the Delaware senator last week as his vice-presidential pick. “He picked himself up. He worked harder than the other guys.”

My closest encounter with Biden came in 2004, when he spoke to a self-help group called the National Stuttering Association at its annual convention in Baltimore. Biden admitted to us that, at 61, this the first time he had ever spoken publicly and candidly about the subject. “When I first started my job as a U.S. senator,” he said, “while those who knew me knew I stuttered, I was reluctant to be nationally identified with it.”

It turns out that school kids weren’t the only ones who mimicked Biden. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said. Then he launched into a story about reading aloud in a seventh-grade class at a Catholic school. When he mispronounced “gentleman,” the nun who taught the class asked him to repeat the word. This time, he stuttered on the initial G. The nun looked at him with contempt. “Mr. B-b-biden,” she said.

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