Democratic Sen. Joe Biden was re-elected to his seventh term in the U.S. Senate Tuesday night.

CHICAGO (CNN) — If things don't turn out well for the Democratic ticket tonight, Joe Biden can be comforted by the fact that he won't be out of a job.

In a race that was essentially a foregone conclusion, Biden was re-elected to his seventh term in the U.S. Senate Tuesday night, beating 39-year-old Republican challenger Christine O'Donnell.

Biden hasn't campaigned for re-election since becoming the vice presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket, but he did release a one-minute campaign ad and mention his re-election at Delaware's Jefferson-Jackson dinner on October 13.

"Just remember folks, I am on the ballot. Don't be carried away with this vice president stuff. I am on the ballot running for my seventh term," said Biden. "So don't forget, don't stop at the top of that ticket, walk your way down. You can vote twice for the first time in your life for the same guy and it be legal." Read the rest of this entry »

Biden says GOP attacks are over the top.

KETTERING, Ohio (CNN) – Joe Biden always closes his speeches by telling supporters that once the election is over, they have to reach out to Republicans, even those who have conducted “scurrilous” attacks against Obama. The same critics, Biden said Friday afternoon, will be calling Barack Obama “the 44th President of the United States of America” after November 4.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we need to move past the politics of division and attack,” Biden told supporters at rally, the first stop on a two day bus-tour through Ohio.

“Over the past weeks, the Republicans have gone way over the top in my view, calling Barack Obama every name in the book, and it probably will get worse in the next three and a half to four days.”

“If you look at who he is, what he's done, and what he plans to do for this country,” Biden continued, “if you work for us in the closing days and choose hope over fear, after next Tuesday the very critics he has now and the rest of America will be calling him something else. They will be calling him the 44th president of the United States of America, our commander-in-chief Barack Obama!”

John McCain released an ad Friday that was void of any negativity or direct mention of Obama, but tells voters, "don't hope for a stronger America, vote for one." McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters Friday morning that their campaign would outspend Obama's in the closing days.

Biden delivered his campaign’s “closing arguments” in a high school gym in central Ohio, a swing state where CNN’s poll of polls suggests Obama leads John McCain by 5 percentage points, 49 to 44 percent, with 7 percent of the state’s voters still undecided. The Delaware senator's battleground state tour continues over the weekend, with more stops in Ohio, Indiana and Florida.

Vice-presidential candidate Biden releases medical records .

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, 65, released his medical records Monday, detailing the treatment of two brain aneurysms in 1988 along with other, mostly minor medical problems.

Biden has had no subsequent aneurysms and has since undergone appropriate screening, according to Dr. Matthew Parker, who spoke on behalf of Biden's physician, Dr. John Eisold, the official attending physician for Congress. Said Parker, "Everything that was supposed to be done is being done."

CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon, said that after 20 years, it's unlikely that the aneurysm history would pose a risk today. Additional aneurysms can be detected by MRI scanning, but the records released Monday do not indicate what, if any, screening has been done in the past two decades. Questioned by reporters on a conference call, a campaign official said those records would be located and released.

Listen: Biden's doctors discuss his health on a conference call.

Biden's brush with death came two decades ago, just months after he gave

up one of his early campaigns for president. Biden, who had suffered headaches
for weeks, found himself with a headache so severe that he lay down in a fetal position, then passed out for five hours. Upon awakening, he made it to a hospital, where doctors discovered a ruptured aneurysm — a condition so severe that a priest was called in to say the last rites, he said.

A brain aneurysm is a bulging blood vessel that occurs when a spot in the vessel weakens and blood pressure forces it out like a balloon. A ruptured aneurysm is generally extremely painful — many doctors say it is typically the most painful headache a person will ever experience. About half of ruptured aneurysms prove fatal, and many others lead to lifelong disability.

Neurosurgeons at Walter Reed Hospital were able to save Biden's life by putting a metal clip on the artery to stop the bleeding. Biden also survived a blood clot that lodged in his lung as he recuperated. Through screening, a second aneurysm was discovered a few months later and surgically removed before it burst. According to the medical records released Monday, Biden's health is generally good. He suffers occasional back pain, as well as chronic sinusitis and severe seasonal allergies dating back to childhood, when asthma was diagnosed. Earlier this year he underwent surgery to correct the sinus condition, a relatively common and minor procedure.

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The Obama-Biden campaign will release Joe Biden's medical history.

SEATTLE (CNN) – The Obama-Biden campaign will release Joe Biden’s medical records to the press Monday for review as well as hold a conference call with a doctor briefed on Biden’s medical history.

Reporters will have around five hours to sift through the records, which will include medical documents from 1988 when Biden suffered two brain aneurysms and a blood clot in his lung.

Biden collapsed in his Rochester, New York hotel room on February 9, writing in his autobiography ‘Promises to Keep’ that it felt like “lightning flashing inside my head, a powerful electric surge – and then a rip of pain like I’d never felt before.”

The Delaware senator – who had just ended his 1988 presidential bid – flew home to Wilmington, where he was rushed to the hospital by his wife Jill, where doctors discovered an aneurysm. A practicing Catholic, Biden was given his last rites, but surgery at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center saved his life.

After the discovery of a blot clot in his lung and another surgery for a second aneurysm, Biden recovered and returned to the Senate seven months later.

The New York Times was given an advance look at Biden’s records Monday, and is reporting that they don’t indicate any current medical problems. A letter from the senator’s doctor – Dr. Eisold, the Capitol physician — said that Biden has “recovered fully without continued effects” from the aneurysm.

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Joe Biden said in Tampa Wednesday that the McCain camp has 'chosen to appeal to fear'.

TAMPA, Florida (CNN) – Joe Biden said in Tampa Wednesday that the McCain camp has “chosen to appeal to fear” in the wake of the economic downturn and called recent comments by Sarah Palin about Barack Obama “outrageous inferences.”

Holding his first campaign rally in a week and a half, Biden said the McCain camp is trying “to take the low road to the highest office in the land,” and that they chose to ignore the “intellectually honest” options of dealing with the economic crisis.

“The one they have chosen is to appeal to fear with a veiled question, who is the real Barack Obama?” said Biden in the University of South Flordia’s Sun Dome arena. “To have a Vice Presidential candidate raise the most outrageous inferences - the ones that John McCain’s campaign is condoning - is simply wrong.”

Palin this week has repeatedly attacked Obama’s character, accusing him of “palling around with terrorists,” referring to Obama’s connection with the Weather Underground’s William Ayers.

“Folks, don’t be distracted, those attacks don’t hurt Barack Obama or me, they hurt you,” said Biden. “Every single false charge and baseless accusation is an attempt to get you to stop paying attention to what’s going on in this country. Beyond the attacks, what is John McCain really offering?”

The Delaware senator called McCain “an angry man lurching from one position to another” and applauded questioners at Tuesday night’s town hall debate for ignoring recent attacks by Republicans on Obama.

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Biden has been on the road defending Obama's record.

(CNN) — Sen. Joe Biden on Wednesday defended criticism of running mate Barack Obama’s Senate record while campaigning in the crucial battleground state of Florida.

“Barack has real experience,” the Democratic VP candidate said. “This guy could have written his ticket to go anywhere. Anywhere at all.”

Biden was speaking at a campaign event focused on the economy in Fort Myers, Florida and discuessed Obama’s stance on the war in Iraq, his work on ethics reform in the Senate, and his proposals on solving the energy crisis. Biden also explicitly dismissed Senator John McCain’s experience in the Senate.

“30 years of bad experience ain’t worthwhile experience,” he said. “You’re not going to take your car—you’re not going to take your car back to a mechanic who for 30 years in a row has screwed it up.”

Biden himself has spent 36 years in the Senate. McCain has worked in Congress since 1982, serving in the Senate since 1987.

Biden was specifically responding to comments McCain aide Rick Davis made to The Washington Post earlier this week when he predicted that this election will come down to each candidates' personas.

"This election is not about issues," Davis said to The Post. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."

Biden sharply criticized that statement, citing the country's economic woes.

“Not about issues?” Biden said. “Well, let me tell you, that means to them this election is not about you being able to scrape up the tuition money to send your kid off to college this September. It's not about whether or not you're going to fill up your gas tank.”

Joe Biden tells Pennsylvanians they're key to the Democratic ticket's success.

DENVER (CNN) — In his first remarks since accepting the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nomination, Joe Biden told the Pennsylvania delegation Thursday morning “we cannot win without winning Pennsylvania.”

“Ya brung me up,” the Pennsylvania-born Biden also told the ballroom in a hotel on the outskirts of Denver.

“Scranton never leaves you, and Pennsylvania never leaves you,” said the Delaware senator, who is sometimes called Pennsylvania’s third senator. “I probably campaigned in Pennsylvania I can’t tell you how many times, literally hundreds of times, hundreds of times, because part of my heart has always been there.”

He stumbled trying to say “the Obama-Biden campaign” but once he got it out, quipped, “I’m getting used to this.”

Read more: Take a look at the electoral map

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Joe Biden spoke to the Delaware delegation this morning in Littleton, Colo.

LITTLETON, Colorado (CNN) – An emotional Joe Biden addressed the convention’s small Delaware delegation at a breakfast at their hotel Tuesday morning, thanking them for their years of support in good times and bad, and joking that the only reason he accepted the nomination was so they could get a prime seating location in the convention hall.

The Delaware senator lavished praise on Barack and Michelle Obama, saying the Illinois senator has a perspective he has never seen in Washington before, and predicting Michelle Obama’s Monday night speech will be remembered as the most significant event at the convention.

Watch: Biden praises Michelle Obama

“Not Barack Obama, not Joe Biden, not Ted Kennedy, but Michelle Obama's speech,” the newly-minted VP candidate said.

“This is a great honor being nominated vice president of the United States, and I am proud of it.” Biden also said as he choked up. “I don't mean in any way to diminish it. But it pales in comparison to the honor that I've had representing you.”

Biden remarked that he wished the breakfast was closed to the media because of what he called “corny sounding” comments.

Watch: Biden tearfully thanks Delaware friends

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