Joe Biden struggled with a number of words and phrases Monday as he gave his first campaign speech of the 2020 Democratic primary battle.
He opened his 27-minute address by expressing his gratitude to local official Rich Fitzgerald: “I want to thank Rich Fritzgerald, the county executive for — the baladanny — the Allegheny County executive for being here.” It was downhill from there and he slurred or stumbled over words like “dignity,” “successful,” and “hospitals.”
Biden was again slurring and mixing up words Tuesday during an event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, according to a Washington Examiner reporter at the event.
If Biden becomes president, he will be 78 years and 61 days old on his first day in office — 77 days older than Ronald Reagan was when he left the White House. He ran for president in 1988 and 2008 and was first elected to the Senate in 1972, when he joined a body of 100 men, only one of whom was not white.
“The country wasn’t built by Wall Street bankers, CEOs, and hudge — heh — and hedge fund managers,” he stammered. Occasionally words were entirely indecipherable. “Union workers, the UAW took extredable — cuts in their pensions and their future and the less to get GM working,” Biden said.
Biden’s speech focused mainly on economic issues with him promising to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and revive the nation’s middle class. “We have to rethink how we define what constitutes a su-successful economy,” he said.
Biden, a native of Scranton, Pa., was speaking in Pittsburgh. As a child, he suffered from a stutter. In a 2011 essay for People Magazine, he wrote about being in 7th grade at St. Helena’s in Wilmington, Delaware: “I still remember the reading, ‘Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentleman…’ I remember reciting, ‘Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentle man.’ The nun said, ‘Master B-B-B-Biden! What’s that word?’ She wanted me to say gentleman. But by then, I had learned to put my sentences into bite-size pieces and I was reading it: ‘gentle’ | breath | ‘man.'”
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, the nuns were great. I never had professional therapy, but a couple of nuns taught me to put a cadence to my speaking, and that’s why I spent so much time reading poetry — Emerson and Yeats. But even in my small boys’ prep school, I got nailed in Latin class with the nickname Joe Impedimenta. You get so desperate, you’re so embarrassed.”
On its website, the Stuttering Foundation cites Biden as “an inspiration to those who stutter, proving that struggling with stuttering does not have to hinder your personal success”.
The former vice president has been criticized by some on both the Left and the Right as too old to run for president. Biden announced he was joining the crowded Democratic presidential primary Thursday. He has consistently polled nationwide as the frontrunner in the race, though many strategists argue that this is based principally on name recognition.
