As I thought about the candidate who has the ability to bring us together as one nation, the progressive but practical vision for progress at home, the experience and personal relationships to repair America’s image abroad, and the best chance at winning the states we have to win to govern, I concluded that Joe Biden is the person for the job.

I have known Joe Biden for over 30 years. I ran my first race for mayor, because Joe reminded me that the penalty for not getting involved is that people less qualified than you get elected. I learned from him how to work with others across the aisle as a state senator and governor. I remain privileged and honored to have worked with him for 8 years during the Obama administration.

As a result of those experiences I am confident he can help heal our nation and return a sense of normalcy and decency to the White House. I know he can build on the success of the Affordable Care Act to again expand affordable health care coverage to the more than a million Americans who have lost coverage during the current administration. He remains committed to rebuilding the middle class in all parts of our country including rural, small town America. He understands the complex and often dangerous world we live in and no candidate in the race has the experience and the relationships to keep us as safe and secure as Joe Biden.

While some may argue that Joe Biden’s lifetime of public service is a draw-back, I see it as a strength. I see a well-defined candidate, who has withstood the test of time. I see a candidate who will best stand up to the character assassination attempts that we know are coming. I know Joe Biden to be a good and decent man. I believe a majority of Americans will find that Joe Biden is the person best prepared and best positioned to heal the divisions within our country and to end the “disorder” of the last 3 years.

The longest-serving African American man on the South Bend, Ind., Common Council is endorsing Joe Biden for president, a rejection of Pete Buttigieg that highlights the South Bend mayor’s struggle with black voters.

Council Vice President Oliver Davis told POLITICO that while it’s nice to see someone representing Indiana in the Democratic presidential primary and bringing national attention to South Bend, Biden is more experienced.

“When you’re flying in the middle of a storm, you want to make sure you have steady, experienced leadership,” Davis said. “I believe that Vice President Biden has demonstrated throughout the years by having a steady hand, he can help lead us through these times, and with all of the challenges we face nationally and now even internationally, he has the relationships, has the skills, and I think he can bring us together in different ways.”

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But Davis also scolded Buttigieg, saying the mayor’s woes attracting support from communities of color “is not a new problem for him.”

“For us, this has been a consistent issue that has not gone away,” Davis said.

In Biden’s office, the first time I bring up his current stuttering, he asks me whether I’ve seen The King’s Speech. He speaks almost mystically about the award-winning 2010 film. “When King George VI, when he stood up in 1939, everyone knew he stuttered, and they knew what courage it took for him to stand up at that stadium and try to speak—and it gave them courage … I could feel that. It was that sinking feeling, like—oh my God, I remember how you felt. You feel like, I don’t know … almost like you’re being sucked into a black hole.”

Presidential candidates usually don’t speak about their bleakest moments, certainly not this viscerally. It resembles the way Biden writes in his memoir about the aftermath of the 1972 car accident that killed his first wife and young daughter and critically injured his two sons, Beau and Hunter: “I could not speak, only felt this hollow core grow in my chest, like I was going to be sucked inside a black hole.”

A few weeks later, I ask Jill Biden what she remembers about sitting next to her husband during the movie. “It was one of those moments in a marriage where you just sort of understand without words being spoken,” she says.

As he watched The King’s Speech, Biden accurately guessed that the screenwriter, David Seidler, was a stutterer. “He showed me a copy of a speech they found in an attic that the king had actually used, where he marks his—it’s exactly what I do!” Biden tells me, his voice lifting. “My staff, when I have them put something on a prompter—I wish I had something to show you.”

In Biden’s office, as my time is about to run out, I bring up the fact that Trump crudely mocked a disabled New York Times reporter during the 2016 campaign. “So far, he’s called you ‘Sleepy Joe.’ Is ‘St-St-St-Stuttering Joe’ next?”

“I don’t think so,” Biden says, “because if you ask the polls ‘Does Biden stutter? Has he ever stuttered?,’ you’d have 80 to 95 percent of people say no.” If Trump goes there, Biden adds, “it’ll just expose him for what he is.”

I ask Biden something else we’ve been circling: whether he worries that people would pity him if they thought he still stuttered.

He scratches his chin, his fingers trembling slightly. “Well, I guess, um, it’s kind of hard to pity a vice president. It’s kind of hard to pity a senator who’s gotten six zillion awards. It’s kind of hard to pity someone who has had, you know, a decent family. I-I-I-I don’t think if, now, if someone sits and says, ‘Well, you know, the kid, when he was a stutterer, he must have been really basically stupid,’ I-I-I don’t think it’s hard to—I’ve never thought of that. I mean, there’s nobody in the last, I don’t know, 55 years, has ever said anything like that to me.”