Politics has never been a place for the thin-skinned, but today candidates are more likely to face personal attacks than any time in recent history.
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Politics has never been a place for the thin-skinned, but today candidates are more likely to face personal attacks than any time in recent history.
Instead of criticizing a candidate’s voting record or stand on issues, politicians are ridiculing things like looks, physical disability or speech.
I was thinking about that recently when former Vice President Joe Biden spoke of overcoming a childhood stutter and former White House Press Secretary Huckabee Sanders tweeted, ““I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I hhhave absolutely no idea what Biden is talking about.”
What kind of person makes fun of a stutter?
I asked Mike Lawrence, who was once press secretary for former Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar, for his thoughts.
“It just shows a lack of decency for a person to ridicule a challenge that another person has faced,” he said.
Lawrence, who lives in Springfield, was born with a cleft palate that was not surgically corrected until he was 22.
“All the way through childhood and college I lived with it,” he said. “Kids made fun of me because of the way I talked. I worked hard to speak distinctly.”
And he overcame that challenge to become the spokesperson for a sitting governor. That’s an incredible accomplishment in anyone’s life.
“I always felt bad that neither of my parents lived long enough to see me become press secretary – after overcoming the challenge of a cleft palate.”