After stroke, Beau Biden back to running, and running for re-election as Del. attorney general

Beau Biden back on the campaign trail after stroke

DOVER, Del. — Three months after he was sidelined by a mild stroke, Beau Biden is back to jogging three to four times a week and campaigning hard for re-election as Delaware’s attorney general, even though he has no Republican opponent.

But Vice President Joe Biden’s eldest son remains coy about his long-range plans, specifically whether he is eyeing a 2014 bid for the Senate seat long held by his father.

“I’m focusing on being a great attorney general,” said Beau Biden, who decided against running this year for the remaining four years of the term his father gave up to become vice president.

“Having long-term dreams is a good thing, … but having a plan has never worked for me, because life always intervenes,” he told The Associated Press in his most extensive interview since he was hospitalized in May.

For Biden, the health scare is a reminder that he needs to balance his job with spending as much time as possible with his family. The 41-year-old was rushed to the hospital May 11.

“I remember it all,” he says, adding that he believes he may have been a “little dehydrated and overcaffeinated” from the night before, when he ran four miles before putting his two young children to bed and staying up late to work on a broken chain saw.

The next morning, something was wrong.

“I was just a little off,” Biden explained. “My arm didn’t feel right. I was able to move it, but I just wasn’t myself.”

After his wife, Hallie, expressed concern, he asked her to take the children to school on her own.

“She thought better of that and called our doctor,” said Biden, who was taken by ambulance to the hospital.

“Stroke was the farthest thing from my mind when I went in,” said Biden, adding that he didn’t know enough to be scared, or to reflect on the brain aneurysm that nearly killed his father in 1987 at age 45.

“I wasn’t at that point equating it to my father’s experience at a similar age… I just wasn’t thinking about being scared or equating it to the other family things.”

Biden’s stroke coincided with the release of an independent report critical of how authorities, including the Department of Justice he oversees, handled investigations of former Delaware pediatrician Earl Bradley, who was arrested in December and is charged with sexually abusing more than 100 patients over more than a decade.

In his first public response to the report, Biden defended prosecutors who investigated Bradley in 2008 knowing he had been investigated in 2005 as well. Prosecutors declined to prosecute Bradley after both investigations.

“They were as aggressive as they could be with the facts that they had in front of them at the time,” said Biden, reiterating that he decided not to run for Senate this year because he wants to see the Bradley case through to the end.

In a February television interview, however, Joe Biden said his son had decided against a Senate bid at Thanksgiving. That’s almost two weeks before the alleged rape that finally led to Bradley’s arrest, but more than a month after popular Republican congressman Mike Castle said he was in the race, which Democratic county executive Chris Coons entered after Biden bowed out.

“My decision was made in light of the Bradley case, after the Bradley case broke,” Biden insisted, refusing to comment on his family’s Thanksgiving discussions.