Joe Lieberman
Joseph Isadore Lieberman was an American politician and lawyer who served as a United States senator from Connecticut from 1989 to 2013. Originally a member of the Democratic Party, he was its nominee for vice president of the United States in the 2000 presidential election. During his final term in office, he was officially listed as an Independent Democrat and caucused with and chaired committees for the Democratic Party.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, Lieberman earned both Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from Yale University. He was elected as a Democrat in 1970 to the Connecticut Senate, where he served three terms as majority leader. After an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1980, he served as the Connecticut attorney general from 1983 to 1989. He narrowly defeated Republican Party incumbent Lowell Weicker in 1988 to win election to the U.S. Senate and was re-elected in 1994, 2000, and 2006. He was the Democratic Party nominee for vice president in the 2000 presidential election, running with presidential nominee and then Vice President Al Gore, and becoming the first Jewish candidate on a U.S. major party presidential ticket. Gore and Lieberman lost the 2000 presidential election to the Republican George W. Bush–Dick Cheney ticket, while winning the popular vote. He also unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. During his Senate re-election bid in 2006, Lieberman lost the Democratic primary election but won re-election in the general election as a third party candidate under the Connecticut for Lieberman party label.
Lieberman was officially listed in Senate records for the 110th and 111th Congress as an Independent Democrat, and sat as part of the Senate Democratic Caucus. After his speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention in which he endorsed John McCain for president, he no longer attended Democratic Caucus leadership strategy meetings or policy lunches. The Senate Democratic Caucus voted to allow him to keep the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Subsequently, he announced that he would continue to caucus with the Democrats. Before the 2016 election, he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, and in 2020, he endorsed Joe Biden for president.
As senator, Lieberman introduced and championed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 and legislation that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. During debate on the Affordable Care Act, as the crucial 60th vote needed to pass the legislation, his opposition to the public health insurance option was critical to its removal from the resulting bill signed by President Barack Obama. He died at the age of 82 in New York City in March 2024.
Early life
Lieberman was born on February 24, 1942, in Stamford, Connecticut, the son of Henry, who ran a liquor store, and Marcia Lieberman. His family is Jewish; his paternal grandparents emigrated from Congress Poland and his maternal grandparents were from Austria-Hungary.In 1963, Lieberman traveled to Mississippi to work in support of the civil rights movement. He received a Bachelor of Arts in both political science and economics from Yale University in 1964, and was the first member of his family to attend college. At Yale, he was editor of the Yale Daily News and a member of the Elihu Club. His roommate was Richard Sugarman, who later went on to become a Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Vermont and advisor to 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Lieberman later attended Yale Law School, receiving his Bachelor of Laws in 1967. After graduation from law school, Lieberman worked as a lawyer for the New Haven-based law firm Wiggin & Dana LLP.
Lieberman received an educational deferment from the Vietnam War draft when he was an undergraduate and law student from 1960 to 1967. Upon graduating from law school at age 25, Lieberman qualified for a family deferment because he was already married and had a child.
Early political career
Lieberman was elected to the Connecticut Senate in 1970, where he served for 10 years, including the last six as Majority Leader. He suffered his first defeat in Connecticut elections in the Reagan landslide year of 1980, losing the race for the third district congressional seat to Republican Lawrence Joseph DeNardis, a state senator from suburban Hamden with whom he had worked closely on bipartisan legislative efforts. In 1981 he wrote an admiring biography of long-time Connecticut and national Democratic leader John Moran Bailey, reviewing also in the book the previous 50 years of Connecticut political history.From 1983 to 1989, Lieberman served as Connecticut Attorney General. In the 1986 general election, Lieberman won more votes than any other Democrat on the statewide ticket, including Governor William O'Neill. As Attorney General, Lieberman emphasized consumer protection and environmental enforcement.
U.S. Senate
Tenure
Lieberman was first elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat in the 1988 election, defeating liberal Republican Lowell Weicker by a margin of 10,000 votes. He scored the nation's biggest political upset that year, after being backed by a coalition of Democrats and unaffiliated voters with support from conservative Republicans, most notably including National Review founder and Firing Line host William F. Buckley Jr. and his brother, former New York Senator James L. Buckley, who were disappointed in three-term Republican incumbent Weicker's liberal voting record and personal style. During the campaign, he received support from Connecticut's Cuban American community, which was unhappy with Weicker. Thereafter, Lieberman remained firmly anti-Castro.Shortly after his first election to the Senate, Lieberman was approached by George J. Mitchell, the incoming Majority Leader who advised him, "Pick out two or three areas that you're really interested in and learn them so that your colleagues know what you're talking about ... You're going to have more influence even as a freshman than you think because you know there's hundreds of issues and inevitably we rely on each other." Recalling the conversation, Lieberman said "that was true when I first came in, although you could see partisanship beginning to eat away at that. But at the end of my 24 years, it was really so partisan that it was hard to make the combinations to get to 60 votes to break a filibuster to get things done."
Lieberman's initiatives against violence in video games are considered the chief impetus behind the establishment of an industry-wide video game rating system during the early 1990s.
File:Bill Clinton and officials on Air Force One.jpg|thumb|300px|Lieberman and Senate colleagues with President Bill Clinton and his national security team on Air Force One to Bosnia in 1997
In 1994, Lieberman made history by winning by the largest landslide ever in a Connecticut Senate race, drawing 67 percent of the vote and beating his opponent by more than 350,000 votes. Lieberman then served as chair of the Democratic Leadership Council from 1995 to 2001. In 1998, Lieberman was the first prominent Democrat to publicly challenge Clinton for the judgment exercised in his affair with Monica Lewinsky; however, he voted against removing Clinton from office by impeachment. Of his criticism of Bill Clinton, Lieberman said in 2014:
It was a very hard thing for me to do because I liked him but I really felt what he did was awful and that unless I felt myself if I didn't say something, I'd be a hypocrite. I also felt that if somebody who was supportive of him didn't say something, it would not be good. And so it got a lot of attention. I got a call from Erskine Bowles who was Chief of Staff about three or four days later saying that he was going to express an opinion which wasn't universally held at the White House – he thought I helped the president by bursting the boil, that was the metaphor he used. The following Sunday morning, I'm at home and the phone rings, it's the White House. And it's now about a week and a couple of days since I made the speech. The president says, it was the president, "I just want you to know that there's nothing you said in that speech that I don't agree with. And I want you to know that I'm working on it." And we talked for about forty-five minutes. It was amazing.
In 2000, Lieberman was elected to a third Senate term, defeating the Republican candidate, Philip Giordano.
Vice presidential campaign
Lieberman's 2000 Senate campaign was concurrent with that year's presidential election. In August 2000, Vice President Al Gore announced that he had selected Lieberman as his vice presidential running mate. Lieberman became the first practicing Jew to run for the nation's second-highest office. Lieberman was selected from a group of potential running mates that reportedly included Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, the team that would form the Democratic presidential ticket four years later.Lieberman had a reputation of being a more ideologically conservative Democrat than Gore. Because of Lieberman's criticism of Clinton's personal behavior, some viewed Gore's choice of Lieberman as a way to distance himself from the scandals of the Clinton White House. The Gore–Lieberman ticket was defeated in a hard-fought election that was contested for weeks after the vote. On December 12, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling brought the race to an official end, confirming the decision in the favor of the Bush-Cheney ticket.
2006 Senate election
Primary
| Candidate | Votes | Percentage |
| Ned Lamont | 146,587 | 52% |
| Joe Lieberman | 136,468 | 48% |
Lieberman sought the Democratic Party's renomination for U.S. Senate from Connecticut in 2006 but lost to the comparatively more liberal Ned Lamont, a Greenwich businessman and antiwar candidate. Lamont received 33 percent of the delegates' votes at the Connecticut Democratic Convention in May, forcing an August primary.
In July, Lieberman announced that he would file papers to appear on the November ballot should he lose the primary, saying, "I'm a loyal Democrat, but I have loyalties that are greater than those to my party, and that's my loyalty to my state and my country." He said he would continue to sit as a Democrat in the Senate even if he was defeated in the primary and elected on an unaffiliated line, and expressed concern for a potentially low turnout. On July 10, the Lieberman campaign officially filed paperwork allowing him to collect signatures for the newly formed Connecticut for Lieberman party ballot line.
On August 8, 2006, Lieberman conceded the Democratic primary election to Ned Lamont, saying, "For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand," and announced he would run in the 2006 November election as an independent candidate on the Connecticut for Lieberman ticket, against both Lamont and the Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger.