Senator, vice president nominee never afraid to buck party
Joseph Lieberman, the doggedly independent four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, becoming the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died Wednesday in New York City. He was 82.
The cause was complications from a fall, his family said in a statement. He fell at his home in the Bronx and was pronounced dead at a hospital in Manhattan.
Lieberman viewed himself as a centrist Democrat, solidly in his party’s mainstream with his support of abortion rights, environmental protections, gay rights and gun control. But he was also unafraid to stray from Democratic orthodoxy, most notably in his consistently hawkish stands on foreign policy.
His full-throated support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the increasingly unpopular war that followed doomed Lieberman’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and led to his rejection by Connecticut Democrats when he sought his fourth Senate term in 2006. He kept his seat by running that November as an independent candidate and attracting substantial support from Republican and unaffiliated voters.
“I have not always fit comfortably into conventional political boxes,” Lieberman said near the end of his Senate career, an understatement that tiptoed around the anger his maverick ways stoked among many liberals.
His transition from Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 on the Democratic ticket to high-profile cheerleader for Republican presidential candidate John McCain eight years later was a turnaround unmatched in recent American politics.
In a prime-time speech at the 2008 Republican convention, Lieberman hailed McCain, a senator from Arizona and former prisoner of war in Vietnam, for his courage and accomplishment. He dismissed Barack Obama, the one-term senator from Illinois and Democratic nominee, as “a gifted and eloquent young man” who lacked the experience needed in the White House.
On international trips to Iraq and other hot spots, Lieberman and McCain had become close friends as well as allies in support of the Iraq War — including President George W. Bush’s decision in 2007 to shore up the faltering U.S. military effort with the “surge” of thousands of additional troops.
McCain seriously considered making Lieberman his running mate, but his advisers warned that Lieberman’s Democratic history and voting record, particularly his stand in favor of abortion rights, would anger convention delegates and split the party. McCain instead chose the right-wing populist governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, a decision he later said he regretted.
Lieberman continued to draw Democrats’ ire after leaving the Senate in 2012, most especially with his efforts to mount a third-party presidential ticket in the 2024 election. As a co-chair of the centrist group No Labels, he helped lead the organization’s campaign to field an alternative to the major-party candidates — a move that some Democrats feared would take votes from President Joe Biden and help Donald Trump recapture the White House.