'Without Joe Biden, I Wouldn't Be Talking To You Today'; Teen Credits Biden For Helping Him Overcome Stutter

A 13-year-old boy opened up on the final night of the Democratic National Convention about how the party’s presidential nominee, Joe Biden, helped him overcome their shared speech disorder of stuttering.

Brayden Harrington delivered an emotionally charged speech Thursday and thanked Biden for giving him tips that helped him address his speech disorder. Harrington said he had met Biden during a campaign event in February in the teen's home state of New Hampshire. After a brief exchange on the rope line, Biden invited Harrington backstage and showed him a copy of the campaign speech he had just delivered with markings determining halts between words.

“Without Joe Biden, I wouldn't be talking to you today,” Harrington said in a video testimonial for Biden Thursday.

"He told me that we were members of the same club: We stutter. It was really amazing to hear that someone like me became vice president," he recalled Biden saying in February. “He told me about a book of poems by Yates he would read out loud to practice.”

"He showed me how he marks his addresses to make them easier to say out loud. So I did the same thing today," Brayden continued, turning around the pages of his speech to show the markings.

“I’m just a regular kid,” Harrington said. “In a short amount of time, Joe Biden made me feel more confident about something that was bothering me my whole life. Joe Biden cared. Imagine what he could do for all of us. Kids like me are counting on you to elect someone we can all look up to. Someone who cares.”

Biden at a CNN town hall in February revealed he dealt with his stutter all his life and that it still affected him. "You know, stuttering, when you think about it, is the only handicap that people still laugh about. That (they) still humiliate people about. And they don't even mean to," he said at the town hall. Biden said at that time that he keeps in touch with about 15 people who stutter, and tells them it is “critically important” not to let the issue define them.

President Donald Trump had referenced Biden’s occasional verbal stumbles to mock a disabled reporter during his 2016 campaign but the latter said at the CNN conference that stuttering has “nothing to do with your intelligence quotient.”