Sarah Huckabee Sanders Gets Cruel

To her credit, Sarah Huckabee Sanders apologized. But I don’t believe for a second that she didn’t intend to mock the speech impediment that former Vice President Joe Biden demonstrated during last night’s Sixth Democratic Primary Debate.

“I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I hhhave absolutely no idea what Biden is talking about. #DemDebate,” the former White House press secretary wrote in a since-deleted Twitter. When she started getting heat for it, Sanders tweeted that she “was not trying to make fun of anyone with a speech impediment,” but rather “simply pointing out” that she couldn’t follow what Biden was saying.

Tellingly, she also erased that tweet, which is saved here for posterity.

I don’t believe Sanders, and not just because she has a track record for being a liar. It’s because her original tweet demonstrates the cruel mimicry that every child who stutters or struggles with a speech impediment is subjected to from classmates and peers while growing up. I should know, because it happened to me.

Like Biden, I too have worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. It’s tough, but not impossible, as demonstrated by the former U.S. Senator from Delaware and Vice President who is a leading favorite to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020. And for his part, Biden – after some uneven performances – did pretty well in last night’s debate.

I’ve worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. And it’s my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same. It’s called empathy. Look it up. https://t.co/0kd0UJr9Rs

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 20, 2019

Biden has learned to control his speech and is remarkably fluent, perhaps more so than most Americans if you were to put them on a debate stage in front of a national televised audience. Someone like me who was born with a stutter, however, recognizes in the former vice president’s speech the subtle pauses, the occasional word substitution, the little strategies that every stutterer eventually learns through trial and error to maintain their fluency.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Biden opens up about his stuttering, telling the author about his struggles with it growing up and how it “can’t define who you are.” He has also worked with kids who themselves have speech difficulties.

“I hope what they see is: Be mindful of people who are in situations where their difficulties do not define their character, their intellect,” Biden said in referring to public perceptions of people such as himself who have a stutter.

Perhaps that struggle has given Biden a sense of empathy for others, especially young people, who have to deal with a speech impediment. At the close of the debate, Biden mentioned a “call list” of people that he and his wife regularly catch up with. One of those people, Biden said, was “a little kid who says ‘I can’t talk, what do I do?'”

In demonstrating the poor child’s plight, Biden impersonated the child’s stutter, as shown here:

Here’s the moment at last night’s #DemDebate where Joe Biden, who stutters himself, impersonated a kid who stutters who he’s regularly in touch with pic.twitter.com/JDwz1FGulR
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 20, 2019

I found it to be a poignant moment, but apparently not Sanders, who responded with the remarkably callous tweet screencapped above. She may try to deny it now, but she obviously mimicked a stutter, even going so far as to type out the elongated and repeated first sounds that people with a speech impediment often will trip on.

That kind of mimicry is cruel and intended to mock, often for the intent of getting laughs from one’s peers, or in this case the approval of the Twitter mob that needs little prodding to pile on someone, especially a target like Biden in today’s polarized political climate. I suspect Sanders knew what she was doing, and that she counted on her conservative followers “liking” and retweeting her in approval.

The only thing is, Sanders quickly found herself at the receiving end of a Twitter ratio. Good enough, or bem feito as my Portuguese-speaking relatives would say.

The cruel instinct that Sanders revealed in mocking a stutter and hitting “send tweet” bothers me on a couple of levels. The first is obviously personal. Having a speech impediment is not someone’s fault, but people like Sanders try to make you think it is. The stutterer often internalizes that, and feels shame at their disability. That in turn can isolate the stutterer from people, creating in them a sense of self-loathing and making them extremely self-conscious about everyday tasks such as making a telephone call or asking someone the time.

Anyone with a speech impediment can probably tell you how they feared the first day of school when the teacher asked the class to go around the room and introduce themselves, and the heartbreaking snickers and laughs from the mean kids in the room when they blocked on a word. Last night on Twitter, Sanders was the mean girl in the back of the classroom.

I’m also bothered because Sanders’ tweet, to me, is emblematic of the kind of cruelty that seems to permeate the culture of the White House that she served in as press secretary. Just this week, Sanders’ former boss, fresh on the heels of being impeached, mocked a widow at a campaign rally and suggested that her late husband, former Democratic Congressman John Dingell of Michigan, was “looking up” from hell.

And lest we forget – I didn’t – Donald Trump attacked the comedian Seth Myers as a “stutterer” in 2011 after Myers skewered him at the White House Correspondents Dinner that year. “I thought Seth Meyers —- his delivery frankly was not good. He’s a stutterer,” Trump said.

The nonprofit Stuttering Foundation quickly responded, criticizing Trump’s use of the word ‘stutterer’ in a derogatory fashion, with the nonprofit’s president saying that she had hoped “this kind of unfortunate comment was a thing of the past.” As far as I can tell, Trump never apologized for that remark.

Again, to her credit, at least Sanders apologized to Biden and said she should have made her point “respectfully.” For someone with “Christian” as the first word in their Twitter bio, that is what you would at least hope to expect. Not cruelty.