[navjack27]

Speaking clearly has nothing to do with mental fortitude. Tons of things can affect the fluency of speech. We really need to move past the days where we judge people's intelligence and competence based on how well the connections of their brain are able to influence the movement of the vocal cords and the tongue the lips and the jaw.

[lamontcg]

It is a requirement for the job of being a national politician.

You have to be able to win elections at that level, and there's no participation trophies for feel-good runs by someone with a handicap, you just lose.

[jstummbillig]

That is what parent is challenging. You can of course disagree. I think it's an interesting point. How much damage do we do to ourselves by societally selecting charismatic people who speak eloquently as leaders (importantly: over other qualities)?

Unclear, but certainly not 0.

[FredPret]

We evolved a natural tendency to like charismatic and funny people, because (I'm speculating) you need a high minimum level of broad cognitive competence to pull that off.

Things like empathy, quick thinking, emotional intelligence, a fresh perspective, broad knowledge of the world, a large vocabulary, and the self-confidence to go with your judgement calls are all involved in telling a single good joke to a crowd.

These are all fantastic things to see in a leader.

[maxerickson]

On an evolutionary scale, it's probably a little simpler than correlation with cognitive competence.

A group united towards a stupid purpose can be more effective than individuals acting towards more reasonable purposes. If this is true, you can select for both following (susceptibility) and leading (charisma).

[edmundsauto]

I feel like the only characteristic needed to be a popular speaker is self-confidence. Have you seen most of the word salad coming out of Trump's mouth?

[FredPret]

It’s word salad, but for his demographic, it’s a salad of carefully selected words they love, delivered with great warmth, charm, or aggression, as appropriate.

[dghlsakjg]

If you think that he is super charismatic (I agree, despite not liking him), are you also saying that he has a broad underlying intelligence?

I think to say that Donald Trump is anything but narrowly good at Charisma and personal marketing is a stretch.

[dghlsakjg]

I disagree. I know quite a few people who are incredibly charismatic, but exceptionally narrow in their cognitive competence. In fact, one of the problems that I would highlight about charisma is that it allows you to be get away with a lot more stupid shit than you would if you had to get by on other talents.

[FredPret]

I agree with your point, but I think your examples are charming one-on-onenor in small groups only.

To be considered charming to a large group of people, like half the USA, you need to be conversant in things that are relevant to all of them. A narrow person can never have a wide appeal.

[khazhoux]

> How much damage do we do to ourselves by societally selecting charismatic people who speak eloquently as leaders

You're arguing a different point. This isn't about charisma. It's about a baseline level of communication.

I'm a Joe supporter but in recent interviews (like BET) there were two parts where I could not make out what he said after 10 rewinds.

[andsoitis]

One has to be practical. Some handicaps are seen by the majority as a negative for the job. You can’t tell them they are wrong for making it a requirement (after all, they hire the candidate).

[everforward]

To me, the role seems to be like 95% charisma as it's largely a figurehead position. Foreign relations, domestic relations, commander in chief of the armed forces are all mostly charismatic functions.

The smart but uncharismatic folks seem better suited to institutional roles where they can guide policy in the right direction without being the public face of the policy. It's not all that different from the distinction between sales and the folks that design/make the product; the groups are complementary but divergent.

[lamontcg]

We don't currently live in that theoretical universe, and won't any time soon.

The one we live in, it is a hard disqualification, and there's an election in 3 months.

We won't fix everything that is broken with how people select leaders in the next 3 months.

[smolder]

Winning elections is only a part of why the US President must be an effective communicator. Even with the greatest staff supporting them, poor communication will hamper their ability to do the job, especially in a crisis situation.

[educasean]

The truth we cannot change is that people simply want to follow charismatic leaders. We can sit and lament on how stupid that is, but we aren't magically fixing that anytime soon.

[gcanyon]

Hell, I am very staunchly liberal/progressive, and even I was swayed by that image after the assassination attempt of Trump with his fist raised.

[readthenotes1]

I was using "speak clearly" as a shibboleth for general mental and physical ability.

There is clearly something wrong with him that was not in evidence in 2020. Whether it's Parkinson's, senility, 12-day-old jet lag, I don't know. But it's clear that it's hard for him to carry on a conversation, and that is basically the job of a politician.

[toast0]

His recent debate performance was poor. But he's had trouble speaking for a long time. Go back and watch older debates or speeches and see. It's all classic speech impedement stuff; he's clearly had lots of training and experience, but sometimes he can't use the words he wants and switches to different words.

I'm honestly not sure what we're looking for in a debate, but most presidential debates since I've been a voter are contests to see who can look like they're listening the best while getting back to a rehearsed talking point the fastest. [1] When you combine that with trouble with words, and maybe some over training, it doesn't look good.

Does it mean he has trouble carrying on a conversation in a real setting? I don't know, it's a totally different setting with different expectations. We don't really get a window into that.

[1] Well except that MTV town hall. Pretty sure Bill had no talking points appropriate there.

[xeromal]

I've watched several old debates and he's a killer debator even with his slip ups. He was anything but that in this recent one.

[SauciestGNU]

There are also different kinds of difficulty speaking. When he was younger, Biden would trip over words or say something not quite right, or make gaffes (supporting same sex marriage before it was the admin policy).

But now his difficulty seems to come from difficulty understanding what is happening around him. He seemed confused by his surroundings multiple times during that awful debate.

I've seen a lot of Biden supporters pointing to his stutter and speaking difficulties, but his troubles have qualitatively and quantitatively changed, and definitely for the worse.

[hn_throwaway_99]

The reason there was no coming back from his debate performance is because it wasn't just some verbal slip up or "classic speech impediment" stuff. Anyone who's taken care of an elderly parent or grandparent recognized the clear signs of age-related mental decline. And it obviously wasn't that single debate, e.g. the news about Clooney's fundraiser where pretty much everyone in attendance thought he had markedly declined, or this recent BET interview where Biden got seriously confused and lost his train of thought: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/17/politics/video/biden-youtube-.... To your question "Does it mean he has trouble carrying on a conversation in a real setting?”, that BET interview was just a taped, 2-person, no-audience interview with a friendly interviewer. I just don't understand how anyone who's been paying attention can state that Biden's mental capacity hasn't declined significantly, and more importantly, how anyone could suggest with a straight face that Biden would have the requisite mental capacity in 4 years hence.

[terminatornet]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSj9gkgCM8Q

could you point out the timestamp where his speech impediment is evident? this was 8 years ago and he appears to be a silver-tongued devil

[johnfn]

Whoa, thanks for sharing this. I've never seen it before. Crazy and kind of sad how much of a difference there was in the last 8 years.

[khazhoux]

> It's all classic speech impedement stuff

Maybe 10 years ago it was that.

But in the last couple of months, it's like his tongue is not moving right. I literally can't understand some of his sentences now, the syllables are so slurred and garbled.

[SuperNinKenDo]

Biden apparently had a speech impediment (basically stutter), for much of his early life, and had to train extremely hard to overcome it. So in general I've always brushed aside criticism of his speaking as it's evident to me that he's generally very articulate and well spoken if you overlook the occassional word salad.

Over the last few months I've generally defending his gaffs to friends even though I don't like Biden as a politician, because I think that kind of discourse is counterproductive politically and stigmatising socially, which I still feel.

However, I have to say, the recent downward spike in his ability to string a sentence together becomes concerning to me, not so much because I think it primary reflects any cognitive decline per se, but it seems to me like a sign that the pressure of the presidency and the campaign are affecting him in _some_ way that is causing his speech impediment to surface at its worst and most frequent yet. So I would still push back on a lot of what you are saying, but yes, at this point, something is clearly off there to a concerning degree.

[exitb]

It sounds nice and correct, but what if it’s literally part of the job?

[malux85]

I agree that mental fortitude is not necessarily correlated with fine grained muscle control, but speaking clearly is a pretty freaking basic requirement for A PRESIDENT

[avalys]

Yes, we shouldn’t confuse verbal fluency with intelligence, or the lack of one with the lack of the other. Perhaps you should go back in time to 2000 and step up to defend George W. Bush.

However, when someone was previously verbally fluent and then the whole world can see that that person’s fluency has deteriorated, it’s completely reasonable to believe that deterioration of other mental functions is happening as well, as seems to be the case with Biden.

[oceanplexian]

Verbal fluency is a job requirement for a president. It doesn't matter if the president is the most intelligent person, it matters that they can communicate effectively, particularly with world leaders in life-or-death situations when a miscommunication can result in a great catastrophe. Personally I would rank intelligence as less important than several other attributes.

[TylerE]

Exactly. A stutter doesn’t cause you to confuse names.

[khazhoux]

No, the names thing has always been exaggerated.

I occasionally call my kids by each others' names. My parents would call me by my brothers' names. This is a running joke in large families. I occasionally in large meetings swap the names of two products we're talking about and have to be corrected. It's just a very low-grade "verbal dyslexia" that means nothing except that the brain isn't a perfectly-wired machine.

[TylerE]

When you confuse the name of the leader of one country with the leader of the country they're at war against, that's...a bit more than that.

[khazhoux]

Occam’s razor— which is more likely:

* Swapping a name as he’s known to do, with the name of the person who is contextually-adjacent and the other main character?

* Thinking the man he just finished discussing our continual support against Russian expansion, was actually Vladimir Putin himself?

[TylerE]

I don’t beleive he’s actually confusing them, but it’s not a good look for a guy who’s supposed to be a leader in uncertain times. One should never be question if the president meant what they just said.

[whycome]

Nations first mute text-only President?

The current generation reaching voting age would much rather send a text than call so.....

[vanattab]

Sooner then you think. President GPT is coming

[ithkuil]

And it's such a double standard. Trump never pretended to speak clearly and now people can in good faith point out that trump has not shown signs of regression because there was nothing he was curating about his persona in the first place and thus nothing to regress.

Whatever Trump says can be construed as some sort of 4d chess hidden message because of a cult of personality that has developed around him. He can hint that asylum seekers escaped from mental asylums but his base will not suspect that he may be the one confusing the two words and instead they will just cheer at the grotesque image because that's the kind of politically incorrect thing they want somebody to say (regardless of whether Trump did that on purpose or not).

I have the feeling that whatever Trump will say and will do will never ever be scrutinized by his side in a way that even remotely resembles the scrutiny to switch Biden has to be subjected to.

And that double standard speaks a lot on the troubled times we're living through.

[cowboylowrez]

I get the feeling that even trumps fans don't really listen to his speeches.

[poes-law]

This comment triggers Poe's Law for me. Given this comment by itself, I would have guessed this was satire. Unfortunately, from a fuller picture, I guess this is actually fundamentalism.

[Shocka1]

I agree for the average person, but at the same time the front man for one of the strongest economies in the world should be able to speak at least on an average level. Unfortunately I would define his speech at this point as poor - please correct me if I'm wrong. This factor seems like a running joke not only in the US, but the entire world.

[catlikesshrimp]

Competency is not a requirement for being a politician. Winning the most votes is. And being elocuent and aggressive helps much more than being coherent

[hn_throwaway_99]

Biden wasn't running for chief scientist somewhere, he was running for President of the United States, and a huge part (probably the primary part) of that job is being able to communicate effectively. If "your brain isn't able to adequately influence the movement of the vocal cords and the tongue the lips and the jaw" then you shouldn't be applying for a job where verbal communication is paramount.

[codr7]

Come on people, what are you chasing here?

His vocal cords are fine, it's just that the words don't make much sense, which is a pretty big problem in that position.

[LooseMarmoset]

it honestly astounds me that people did not recognize Biden’s cognitive decline in the 2020 debates. it was obvious then, and it was obvious a month ago when all the news outlets were boldly proclaiming that Biden was fully fit for duty.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> it was obvious a month ago when all the news outlets were boldly proclaiming that Biden was fully fit for duty.

Dude, you just completely made that up. Certainly every news outlet I recall, from NY Times, WaPo and CNN to Fox News and the WSJ were all running a ton of articles questioning Biden's fitness for another term. None of them were "boldly proclaiming" anything.

[dmazzoni]

It's not verbal flubs that are a problem. Tons of presidents had that tendency before (George W Bush, for example).

[mensetmanusman]

Speaking clearly has everything to do with mental fortitude for the most important communication job in the US.

[newsclues]

How else do you prove competence of a leader to hundreds of millions of citizens?

[xeromal]

If you play a video of Biden in 2004 or 2008 debates, you'll notice something has changed.

[gherkinnn]

Introducing Zelensky as Mr Putin isn't a sign of incompetence?

[oezi]

No, it is a sign that both terms occupy close relationships in the brain. I consistently fumble the name of my elder sister with the name of my eldest daughter and I know many people who have similar mixups.

[keybored]

Are you nitpicking that specific complaint? Or saying that Biden seems relatively okay?

Even the Democratic Party has given up on the far-fetched excuses. It’s time to surrender to the evidence. That example is just one out of dozens.

[gcanyon]

Laying out an argument (Biden mixing up names indicates he's senile) and having it disproven doesn't prove the case.

[khazhoux]

Biden is showing signs of decline, but the name-swapping thing was never (and still isn't) that. It's mental klutzery, nothing more. As the other person pointed out, it is /very/ common when two names are mentally-adjacent, to reach for the wrong one. My parents would call me by my brothers' names all the time, and I just did that with my own kids this morning.

Anyone who thinks that Biden got confused and thought he was in a press conference with Vladimir Putin (!!) is just spouting nonsense.

[chaostheory]

During the same event, he called his VP, Vice President Trump. Regardless of what you call it, it’s a bad sign similar to GW Bush’s constant gaffes.

[arp242]

I've been mixing up names for as long as I can remember. I'm not even 40. Of all the things to judge him on this rates pretty low on my list, especially since Biden has a bit of a history of "gaffes" like this.

That said, it's pretty obvious a lot of energy and fire that Biden previously had is no longer present. Or at least very inconsistently present.

[pennybanks]

the thing is. i dont remember a single fumbling of words by biden until he appeared back into the public recently. like he was great at speaking and decently quick witted.

the extreme change is worrisome. i mean is this him now? will it keep deteriorating? why would anyone think it wont. how much of a medical concern will be 1 year later. 2 3? this is what people are concerned with

[arp242]

Nah, he was known for this kind of thing. e.g. from 2013, "Best of the vice president's 'Bidenisms'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLcIMdHQvz8

2010, "Joe Biden, the vice-president who keeps putting his foot in it": https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/28/joe-biden-vice...

Those were just the top two results in Google for "biden vice president gaffe", limiting the date to before 2016.

I mean, it's probably gotten worse, although I can't really judge that. But it's certainly not a new thing. I'm not saying he's not too old and tired, I'm just saying that merely the mixing up of a name alone really isn't a sign of incompetence.

[tim333]

Biden has more problems than just speaking unclearly. The thoughts get muddled at times too.

[mschuster91]

So what, at least he doesn't go completely off-prompt with utterly random unrelated bullshit every minute like your average Trump speech.

The doublespeak from the Republican side regarding Biden's capabilities has been, frankly, astonishing.

[jjtheblunt]

You've got to be kidding, I must as a non-partisan say. The observations entertain the republican world, but they're there nonetheless for everyone, or this wouldn't have been forced by the democrats.

[ithkuil]

I agree.

That said, it's infuriating when you have an opponent that can literally say whatever he wants however unintelligible it may be and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said. The double standard is astonishing.

But yeah obviously there certainly are better candidates than Biden to run for president. Why he or she hasn't been found in 2020 eludes me.

[reducesuffering]

> Why he or she hasn't been found in 2020 eludes me

Well we had the 2020 primaries. Bernie and Warren were too left to win a general election. Pete Buttigieg won Iowa, got 2nd in New Hampshire, but only cancelled the campaign after South Carolina, once it dawned that the South has too much of a quiet problem of Buttigieg being gay and preferring Biden simply because he was Obama VP. Without those sad facts, we could've had Buttigieg winning 2020 and 2024.

[mschuster91]

> That said, it's infuriating when you have an opponent that can literally say whatever he wants however unintelligible it may be and his cult-like followers will just find the meaning kn what he said.

Yeah, just three days ago, praising Hannibal Lecter, or remember "covfefe" from a few years back? Or the QAnon bunch where some people managed to assemble millions of people [1] by essentially doing "tea leaves predictions" on Trump speeches?

There is no equivalent to that level of derangedness on the Democrat side, not even close.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/qanon-groups-have-mil...

[Izkata]

Is this satire? A typo on twitter and something that wasn't Trump?

Meanwhile, early this month, Biden called himself the first black woman to serve with a black president, as well as referred to "vice president Trump" when apparently talking about Harris.

[vkou]

It's not that he's incompetent (I certainly consider him dramatically more competent to do literally anything (or when the situation calls for it, nothing) than his opponent), it's that he's perceived by some voters to be incompetent, and that may cost the election, and I'd really rather not be dragged along into that universe because his vanity doesn't let him move over.

[dahfizz]

Marginally better than trump isn’t going to cut it. We need a good president.

[DANmode]

The fact that this needs to be said is indicative of the current day.

[goatlover]

Yes, but enough prominent Democrats and donors didn't want to support someone with Biden's faltering condition. Thus the pressure for him to step down. It doesn't matter what the Republicans are willing to support. Democrats are trying to win an election and put someone competent in power.

[keybored]

A stream of consciousness rant is not a sign of mental decline as long as the sentences are coherent.

[endofreach]

Sounds good to me. Will you inform the other world leaders with nuclear weapons?

[basementcat]

If one disqualifies people based on speech impediments, is it much of a stretch to disqualify people for their skin color or religion?

[dahfizz]

Yes. That’s a huge stretch.

[jiggawatts]

Yes. Not all discrimination is the same.

Being ugly is a disqualifying trait for getting a job as a supermodel.

Being unfit is a disqualifying trait for being an Olympic athlete.

Being unable to stay awake and say coherent sentences is a disqualifying trait for being the president of the most powerful nation on earth.

Being black or latino is a disqualifying trait for playing a Roman emperor in a movie — which is why Netlix will surely try, because they’re unable to comprehend what the problem even is, and why their “equality” is groan-inducing.

PS: If I was a US citizen, I would vote for AOC not because of her sex or race but because neither of those influence my decision. Do they influence yours?

[basementcat]

Can you explain why being black or Latinx would disqualify one from playing a Roman emperor in a movie?

[lotsoweiners]

If historical authenticity is semi-expected then having Samuel L Jackson as Nero isn’t going to fly. If race swap is part of the gimmick like in Hamilton then I don’t think it would matter.

[khazhoux]

If going for visual realism, then obviously a black man would not look the part, since all roman emperors were caucasian (except possibly Septimius Severus).

A latino man could almost certainly fit, though.

[adolph]

sed 's/ b/\u&/' || sed 's/ L/\L&/'

[adolph]

> Being black or latino is a disqualifying trait for playing a Roman emperor in a movie

Given a person playing a Roman Emperor is acting in a role not laboring as a ruler, consider that:

The emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius -- among Rome's best and wisest rulers -- and the poet Seneca all were of Spanish origin.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/horizon/june9...

The Four African Emperors were Septimius Severus, Clodius Albinus, Marcus Macrinus and Aemilianus.

https://peek-01.livejournal.com/62062.html

[newfriend]

Meaningless.

Being born in Roman Hispania isn't the same as being "of Spanish origin" or "latinx". Being born in Africa doesn't make you black. Elon Musk is the richest African in the world.

If Shaq had been born in China, would he be a good candidate to portray first sovereign Emperor of China?

A black bear born in the arctic isn't a polar bear.