13-year-old Braydon Harrington, from New Hampshire, spoke of connecting with Joe Biden over stuttering. DNC

One certain star of the Democratic Nominating Convention was 13-year-old Brayden Harrington, who bravely stuttered his way through a campaign endorsement  of Joe Biden. Harrington had met Biden back in February at a CNN Town Hall in Concord, NH, where Biden had told stories of his struggle with stuttering as a child.

Biden’s sister later observed, “The stutter at the time was horrible for him. But I think it was a great gift, because he did not let the stuttering define him.” This is the message that Biden shared with Brayden Harrington in Concord. More than a pep talk, Biden’s advice extended to examples of how he marked his speeches with pauses to prevent the stutter from interrupting him. He gave Brayden the text of a speech marked with his pauses to keep as a reference.

“And in a short amount of time, Joe Biden made me feel more confident about something that’s  bothered me my whole life. Joe Biden cared. Imagine what he could do for all of us,” Harrington said in his video-taped campaign speech. The young man’s confidence was displayed throughout his speech, as his struggles with the “s’ sound were retained in the recording. He never looked dismayed or frustrated with his stutter; he just overcame it and went on. That is the essence of learning: coping with frustration and trying again.

We can imagine the Democratic Presidential candidate facing off against stuttering as a boy. He even lapsed briefly into a stutter in a Democratic Primary debate in December. The former White House Press secretary ridiculed Biden on Twitter, but later took it down and apologized. But she reminds us of Trump’s ridiculing of a disabled person at a campaign appearance earlier that year.  Even adults enjoy victimizing people with handicaps, for whatever reason.

Biden told Harrington that he used to read Yeats out loud as a young man to help him overcome his stutter. I wondered which poems, and I thought of one entitled, “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.”  Apparently Yeats’ friend must have been competing with another dishonest rival, because he says,

Now all the truth is out,

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat,

For how can you compete,

Being honor bred, with one

Who were it proved he lies

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;

In this poem of encouragement, Yeats portrays his friend as honest and willing to accept defeat, while his rival has no sense of decency to give credit to him.  The bravado of the rival is contrasted with the inner strength of Yeats’ friend in the final lines.

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.

It is not hard to imagine a stutter as such a defeat and the quiet resolve to fight on as a “place of stone,” a hidden place where you must shape your character.  Yeats concedes that “of all things known,/ That is most difficult.”  I love that he rhymes “exult”with “difficult.”  It makes the emotional healing and resolve to go on more possible. I imagine Brayden Harrington as forming this resolve after meeting Joe Biden.

That was the endorsement we will all remember. You can say it was exploiting a child for a campaign or that there are others who struggle more with persecution, but it was an indelible memory.  It was a teen-ager showing his vulnerability to millions of others for a cause he believed in.  How many of us have such courage?