The scene-stealer at
Thursday’s Democratic convention was not a politician or Hollywood A-lister,
but a 13-year-old boy whose stutter has substantially improved through the help
of the man at the center of the gathering itself: Joe Biden.

Brayden Harrington
said in a touching video aired on the event’s final night that he had met Biden
while the candidate with blue-collar roots campaigned in New Hampshire earlier
this year.

“Without Joe
Biden, I wouldn’t be talking to you today,” the young boy wearing braces
and a wide smile explained.

“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,” Brayden said, halting on some
of the words.

As a child, Biden, now
77, was hampered by a stutter so severe he was cruelly nicknamed
“Dash.”

The candidate
occasionally tells the story on the campaign trail of his effort to overcome
the condition, about how he read from books by Irish poets and practiced his
diction at night with a flashlight in front of a mirror.

Brayden said Biden sat
him down and told him about the poems that he read aloud and practiced, and
showed the boy how he marks his speeches in a way that helps make them easier
to recite.

“I’m just a
regular kid and in the short amount of time, Joe Biden made me more confident
about something that’s bothered me my whole life,” the boy said. “Joe
Biden cared. Imagine what he can do for all of us.”

A video about Biden’s
life that ran before he accepted his party’s nomination Thursday night
mentioned the candidate’s childhood stutter, and about how his mother drove him
back to school when he came home saying he had been mimicked by a teacher.

“Did you say to
my son Mr. B-B-Biden?” Biden says in the clip, quoting his mother.

“The nun said ‘I
was just trying to make a point.’ My mother stood up (and said) ‘If you ever
talk to my son like that again I’ll come back and rip that damn bonnet off your
head, do you understand me?”

The issue became
visible during the campaign when he stumbled multiple times during the
Democratic debates.

In a revealing
interview last year in US magazine The Atlantic, Biden acknowledged he still
gets caught on words as an adult, which could help explain some of his
slips. The candidate told a town hall in February that when he meets someone
with a stutter, he often gives them his private number.

“They can call
me,” he said.