A 13-year-old boy paid tribute to Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention after the presidential nominee helped him overcome his stutter.
Brayden Harrington told the DNC how the former vice president had recommended reading W.B. Yeats' poems to practice speaking without stuttering, shortly before Mr Biden accepted his party's presidential nomination on the final night of the DNC.
Speaking via video-link from his home in Concord, New Hampshire, the teenager got stuck as he read his words carefully from a piece of paper.
"We stutter," Brayden began the video, briefly getting stuck on the "s" sound before working his way through the word.
"It's really amazing to hear that someone became vice president despite stuttering," Brayden said. "He told me about a book of poems by Yeats that he would read out loud to practice."
Mr Biden has spoken frequently about how overcoming a stutter was one of the hardest things he's done in life.
Brayden and Mr Biden met at a February CNN town hall in Concord, where the Democrat spoke about overcoming a severe childhood stutter. Mr Biden has frequently spoken through the years about the anger and frustration of being mocked by classmates and a nun in Catholic school — and how that motivated him to work to overcome it.
"It has nothing to do with your intellectual makeup," he said at the town hall.
After the event, Mr Biden invited Brayden backstage to talk more about learning to control a stutter. Mr Biden noted that he'd practised by speaking as he looked at himself in the mirror.
He also gave the boy a speech he'd prepared for delivery, complete with markings he'd made on its pages that showed where he had time to take breaks and pauses so that the words would come out more smoothly.
Brayden held up that speech for convention viewers on Thursday.
"I'm just trying to be a kid," Brayden said. "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."
"Kids like me are counting on you to elect someone we can all look up to," he added.
Mr Biden has described how his stutter can sometimes returns on certain words, especially if he's tired.
After he talked about it during a Democratic primary debate in December — and even started to make the sounds of a stutter — then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders ridiculed Mr Biden on Twitter.
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The tweet was later deleted and Sanders apologised. Mr Biden said afterward that he had no regrets "because I know what it's like to be humiliated."
