who ya got?

[TDub]

The eminem approach

[Shirley]

I would guess his numbers would soar if he could somehow expose his lingual liability in a self-deprecating way during a nationally televised debate or interview.

That occurred to me, too. And if Biden ends up with the nomination and has to debate Trump, who takes pleasure in making fun of people with disabilities, he definitely should think of a way to make his problem known.

[Mjl]

Thing is, he didn't use to have these issues in debates or interviews. He was always a gaffe machine, but the inability to finish thoughts is new

[Deleted User 104]

It's funny how right now the moderate left wants to get rid of Bernie, but they can't really do anything because it's going to piss off a huge voting base.

[seahawk]

Because they can speak in complete sentences. They appear to know what the questions are in the debates instead of rambling incoherently and looking confused while misspeaking often...

I too cringe every time Biden gets hung up, but turns out, maybe I should admire him even more?

What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say

His verbal stumbles have voters worried about his mental fitness. Maybe they’d be more understanding if they knew he’s still fighting a stutter.

His eyes fall to the floor when I ask him to describe it. We’ve been tiptoeing toward it for 45 minutes, and so far, every time he seems close, he backs away, or leads us in a new direction. There are competing theories in the press, but Joe Biden has kept mum on the subject. I want to hear him explain it. I ask him to walk me through the night he appeared to lose control of his words onstage.

“I—um—I don’t remember,” Biden says. His voice has that familiar shake, the creak and the croak. “I’d have to see it. I-I-I don’t remember.”

We’re in Biden’s mostly vacant Washington, D.C., campaign office on an overcast Tuesday at the end of the summer. Since entering the Democratic presidential-primary race in April, Biden has largely avoided in-depth interviews. When I first reached out, in late June, his press person was polite but noncommittal: Was an interview really necessary for the story?

...Detroit was Biden’s chance to regain control of the narrative. And then something else happened. The candidates were talking about health care. At first, Biden sounded strong, confident, presidential: “My plan makes a limit of co-pay to be One. Thousand. Dollars. Because we—”

He stopped. He pinched his eyes closed. He lifted his hands and thrust them forward, as if trying to pull the missing sound from his mouth. “We f-f-f-f-further
support—” He opened his eyes. “The uh-uh-uh-uh—” His chin dipped toward his chest. “The-uh, the ability to buy into the Obamacare plan.” Biden also stumbled when trying to say immune system.

Stuttering can feel like a series of betrayals. Your body betrays you when it refuses to work in concert with your brain to produce smooth speech. Your brain betrays you when it fails to recall the solutions you practiced after school with a speech therapist, allegedly in private, later learning that your mom was on the other side of a mirror, watching in the dark like a detective. If you’re a lucky stutterer, you have friends and family who build you back up, but sometimes your protectors betray you too.

A Catholic nun betrayed Biden when he was in seventh grade. “I think I was No. 5 in alphabetical order,” Biden says. He points over my right shoulder and stares into the middle distance as the movie rolls in his mind. “We’d sit along the radiators by the window.”...

The students are taking turns reading a book, one by one, up and down the rows. “I could count down how many paragraphs, and I’d memorize it, because I found it easier to memorize than look at the page and read the word. I’d pretend to be reading,” Biden says. “You learned early on who the hell the bullies were,” he tells me later. “You could tell by the look, couldn’t you?”

For most stutterers, reading out loud summons peak dread. A chunk of text that may take a fluent person roughly a minute to read could take a stutterer five or 10 times as long. Four kids away, three kids away. Your shoulders tighten. Two away. The back of your neck catches fire. One away. Then it happens, and the room fills with secondhand embarrassment. Someone breathes a heavy sigh. Someone else laughs. At least one kid mimics your stutter while you’re actively stuttering. You never talk about it. At night, you stare at the ceiling above your bed, reliving it.

“The paragraph I had to read was: ‘Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentleman. He laid his cloak upon the muddy road suh-suh-so the lady wouldn’t soil her shoes when she entered the carriage,’ ” Biden tells me, slightly and unintentionally tripping up on the word so. “And I said, ‘Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentle man who—’ and then the nun said, ‘Mr. Biden, what is that word?’ And it was gentleman that she wanted me to say, not gentle man. And she said, ‘Mr. Buh-Buh-Buh-Biden, what’s that word?’ ”

Biden says he rose from his desk and left the classroom in protest, then walked home. The family story is that his mother, Jean, drove him back to school and confronted the nun with the made-for-TV phrase “You do that again, I’ll knock your bonnet off your head!” I ask Biden what went through his mind as the nun mocked him.

“Anger, rage, humiliation,” he says. His speech becomes staccato. “A feeling of, uh—like I’m sure you’ve experienced—it just drops out of your chest, just, like, you feel … a void.” He lifts his hands up to his face like he did on the debate stage in July, to guide the v sound out of his mouth: void.

By all accounts, Biden was both popular and a strong athlete in high school. He was class president at Archmere Academy, in Claymont, Delaware. His nickname was “Dash”—not a reference to his speed on the football field, but rather another way to mock his stutter. “It was like Morse code—dot dot dot, dash dash dash dash,” Biden says. “Even though by that time I started to overcome it.”

I ask him to expand on the relationship between anger and humiliation, or shame.

“Shame is a big piece of it,” he says, then segues into a story about meeting a stutterer while campaigning.

[...]

Heard Biden being interviewed this morning and there were complete sentences, none of the odd sequencing away that we see on the debate stage and he was making great sense. Even when he caught himself while talking about a vice-presidential partner, he quickly expanded on the subject, but didn't have the sound that must be stuttering that we hear in the debates.

[Deleted User 104]

One of the major problems with the other candidates is that they are just attacking one another with no real substance. Similar to how many people discuss things on here. That kind of noise turns off normal people.

[Shirley]

It's funny how right now the moderate left wants to get rid of Bernie, but they can't really do anything because it's going to piss off a huge voting base.

^^^

IMO, threading that needle is the rate-limiting step to winning the presidential election, for democrats.

[Deleted User 104]

A lot of people think Bernie can't win, but I completely disagree. If Trump can win, so could he.

[Shirley]

[Shirley]

I try not to carpet bomb you with posts, so several days after the Nevada caucuses I resisted posting a tweet about how long it had been since we'd heard about Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Ukraine, since Bernie had become the democratic frontrunner.

What's the over/under that we're about to be subjected to a lot more media about just that, from the criminal enterprise known as the Trump Administration?

[Shirley]

Props to Tom for being willing to face reality:

[Deleted User 289]

In the last 2 weeks the Dem frontrunner momentum went pretty much from Pete to Bernie to Joe.
As I said to my mother Thursday night, the Dems very well may be fucked when 70%+ of them are going to have to go to the voting booth on November 3rd (or before - early voting) and vote for the Dem candidate that they didn't want to win the nomination.

[DCHawk1]

Joe isn't the frontrunner.

By Tuesday night, he'll be out of the race.

[Deleted User 289]

You're right, Joe isn't the frontrunner and you're probably right that after Tuesday night he will probably/possibly be out of the race - but it's hard to say he didn't gain a tad bit of momentum yesterday.
Imagine that - A majority of the Dems who went to the polls in a southern state (with African Americans who vote) decided they preferred someone other than Bernie, Mike, Liz, Pete, and Amy.
Like I said, the Dems very well may be fucked.

[Mjl]

Joe isn't the frontrunner.

By Tuesday night, he'll be out of the race.

You're saying it will be only Bloomberg and Bernie left after Super Tuesday?

Wanna bet?

[DCHawk1]

No. If I wanted to say that I would have.

But Biden is broke (and broken).

[DCHawk1]

Damn.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/democratic ... g-service/

[Deleted User 289]

How African Methodist Episcopal of them.

[Shirley]

[DCHawk1]

Because...of course.