The senator who bucked his party
In his 24 years as a Connecticut senator, Joe Lieberman displayed a dogged independent streak that drew both admiration and derision. In 2000, he served as Al Gore’s running mate, becoming the first Jewish candidate on a major party’s national ticket. Eight years later he backed Republican John McCain for president, while dismissing Barack Obama as a lightweight. As an independent in 2009, he gave Democrats the 60th vote they needed to pass Obamacare, but insisted on killing the option of a government-run health plan. He was a hawk who championed the Iraq War and a moralist who excoriated then-President Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair—and also a staunch backer of abortion rights and environmental protection. While he angered many Democrats, Lieberman said he was led by principle over political expedience. “I have not always fit comfortably into conventional political boxes,” he said.
Lieberman grew up in Stamford, Conn., where his father owned a liquor store, said Politico. After Yale and Yale Law School he spent a decade in the Connecticut state senate, then six years as state attorney general. In 1988 he unseated liberal
Republican Sen. Lowell P. Weicker, with backing from Republicans like conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. In D.C. he “became known as a serious-minded legislator” who worked “both sides of the aisle,” said The Washington Post. His 1998 rebuke of Clinton “cemented his reputation for diligent morality.” It also made him an attractive VP pick for Gore, who was “anxious to distance himself from Clinton’s tawdry personal conduct.” Lieberman tried a
2004 presidential run, but his support for the Iraq War doomed him in the Democratic primary. In 2006 he lost a primary to an antiwar candidate, but ran as an independent and won in an upset.
In later years Lieberman moved “closer to the neo-conservative Right,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). Many Democrats saw his McCain endorsement as “treachery” and his disparagement of Obama as “the last straw.” He left the Senate in 2012, working for a law firm, joining a conservative think tank, and recently serving as co-chair of the centrist party No Labels. In that role, Lieberman railed against the growing partisan divide he’d warned about in his parting Senate speech. Progress, he said, “requires reaching across the aisle and finding partners.”