Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut’s four-term United States senator and Vice President Al Gore’s Democratic working mate within the 2000 presidential election, which was gained by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney when the Supreme Court docket halted a Florida poll recount, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 82.
His household stated in an announcement that the trigger was problems of a fall. His brother-in-law Ary Freilich stated that Mr. Lieberman’s fall occurred at his residence within the Riverdale part of the Bronx and that he died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Higher Manhattan.
At his political peak, on the edge of the vice presidency, Mr. Lieberman — a nationwide voice of morality as the primary main Democrat to rebuke President Invoice Clinton for his sexual relationship with the White Home intern Monica Lewinsky — was named Mr. Gore’s working mate on the Democratic Nationwide Conference that August in Los Angeles. He grew to become the nation’s first Jewish candidate on a major-party presidential ticket.
Within the ensuing marketing campaign, the Gore-Lieberman staff confused themes of integrity to sidestep the Clinton administration’ scandals, and Mr. Lieberman urged People to carry faith and religion extra prominently into public life.
The ticket gained a slim plurality of the favored votes — a half-million greater than the Bush-Cheney Republican ticket. However on the night of Election Day, no clear winner had emerged within the Electoral School, and an intense authorized battle took middle stage.
After weeks of dispute, it got here right down to the leads to Florida, the place fewer than 600 votes appeared to separate the opposing candidates. In an unsigned landmark choice on Dec. 12, the US Supreme Court docket dominated, 5-4, that totally different requirements of recounting in numerous counties had violated the equal safety clause of the Structure and ordered an finish to the recounts. The choice successfully awarded Florida’s 25 electoral votes, and the presidency, to Mr. Bush.
“It was a miscarriage of justice on two levels,” Mr. Lieberman stated in a 2023 interview for this obituary. “One was that the Florida Supreme Court had already ruled in our favor to continue the recounts, and the other was that it was an extrajudicial political decision made in the crisis of a transition of power, and out of line with precedents of the Supreme Court.”
Mr. Lieberman sought the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination however misplaced a number of primaries and withdrew from the race in February. He believed his assist for the warfare in Iraq had doomed his candidacy.
Even his standing with Connecticut voters had slipped. Working for a fourth Senate time period in 2006, he misplaced the Democratic major to an antiwar candidate however gained in a surprising upset within the normal election as a third-party unbiased on the “Connecticut for Lieberman” poll line.
Along with his presidential hopes in tatters, Mr. Lieberman in 2008 attended the Republican Nationwide Conference and endorsed his buddy, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for the presidency. Mr. McCain had Senator Lieberman vetted as a potential working mate however finally selected Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and misplaced the election to Senator Barack Obama.
Mr. Lieberman, a digital outcast in his personal celebration, had stopped attending Democratic Senate caucuses. However after a humbling assembly with the Senate majority chief, Harry Reid, he was allowed to maintain his Homeland Safety Committee chairmanship and resumed caucusing with the celebration.
Approaching Senate retirement, he endorsed nobody within the 2012 presidential election, however he supported Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her presidential run in opposition to Donald J. Trump in 2016 and Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump in 2020.
Throughout his Senate tenure from 1989 to 2013, Mr. Lieberman was an unbiased who wore no labels simply. He known as himself a reform, centrist and reasonable Democrat, however he typically sided with the Democrats on home points, like abortion decisions and civil rights, and with the Republicans on overseas and protection insurance policies.
He supported Israel and known as himself an “observant” Jew however not an Orthodox one as a result of he didn’t observe strict Orthodox practices. His household saved a kosher residence and attended Sabbath providers. To keep away from conveyances on a Sabbath, he as soon as walked throughout city to the Capitol to dam a Republican filibuster after attending providers in Georgetown.
Many Democrats criticized Mr. Lieberman’s assist for the warfare in Iraq, however admirers stated his strengths with voters lay in his rectitude, his non secular religion and his willingness to compromise.
“He may be a thoroughgoing moderate in his politics, but he is a true conservative in temperament and style,” The New Yorker stated in a 2002 profile. “His world is an orderly place where people wait in line, take their turns and generally behave themselves.”
After the terrorist assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Lieberman led the Senate effort to create a brand new Division of Homeland Safety, a cupboard company that consolidated 22 federal entities to counter terrorism and coordinate responses to pure disasters. He was named chairman of the brand new Senate Committee on Homeland Safety in 2003.
He additionally solid the sixtieth and deciding vote beneath Senate guidelines to cross Mr. Obama’s Inexpensive Care Act in 2010 — a very powerful bundle of well being care laws for the reason that creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.
“As a Democrat, Joe wasn’t afraid to engage with Senators from across the aisle and worked hard to earn votes from outside his party,” Mr. Bush stated in an announcement after Mr. Lieberman’s dying. “He engaged in serious and thoughtful debate with opposing voices on important issues.”
A Yale-educated lawyer, Mr. Lieberman started his political profession in 1970 by unseating Ed Marcus, the Connecticut State Senate’s Democratic majority chief. He credited a younger Yale legislation scholar on his workers, Invoice Clinton, with engineering his essential major victory.
After a decade within the State Senate, the final six years of which he was the Democratic majority chief, Mr. Lieberman misplaced a race for a seat within the Home of Representatives in 1980. Three years later, he was elected lawyer normal of Connecticut, the primary to carry the put up full-time. In that workplace, he defended shopper and environmental protections and was re-elected in 1986, however he left the job after profitable his first Senate race in 1989.
Within the Senate, he supported free commerce and unions and led a marketing campaign in opposition to intercourse and violence in video video games. The trouble generated a video rankings system within the Nineteen Nineties and nationwide publicity for Mr. Lieberman.
His marketing campaign for a second time period in 1994 scored the most important landslide ever in a Connecticut Senate race: He collected 67 % of the ballots and buried his foe by 350,000 votes. For six years, he was chairman of the Democratic Management Council. And in 1998, when Invoice Clinton’s affair with Ms. Lewinsky broke, Mr. Lieberman chastised the president publicly.
“It was a very hard thing for me to do because I liked him,” he advised Invoice Kristol, the neoconservative commentator. “But I really felt what he did was awful.” A remorseful Mr. Clinton later known as Mr. Lieberman, saying, “I just want you to know that there’s nothing you said in that speech that I disagree with.”
In 2000, whereas working for the vice presidency on Mr. Gore’s ticket, Mr. Lieberman concurrently gained a 3rd time period within the Senate handily, with 64 % of the vote, turning again a problem from the Republican Philip Giordano. However six years later, Mr. Lieberman hit a wall looking for a fourth time period. Ned Lamont, a Greenwich businessman and critic of the Iraq warfare, gained 52 % of the vote in a major.
Ordinarily, dropping a major is a dying knell: Marketing campaign donations dry up, colleagues and the press flip away, and the loser drops out or runs as an unbiased.
Nevertheless, Mr. Lieberman refused to surrender. Many citizens noticed the race as a referendum on President Bush, whose claims that President Saddam Hussein of Iraq had weapons of mass destruction had been disproved, suggesting that he had taken the nation to warfare beneath false pretenses. With broad Republican endorsements, Mr. Lieberman simply defeated Mr. Lamont within the normal election for one final Senate time period. (Mr. Lamont grew to become Connecticut’s governor in 2019.)
Mr. Lieberman was additionally instrumental in Mr. Obama’s profitable 2010 effort to repeal a 17-year-old “Don’t ask, don’t tell” Armed Forces coverage, which had pressured homosexual and lesbian service members to be closeted or face discharges.
On Jan. 2, 2013, Mr. Lieberman gave a parting tackle within the Senate. “It was a lonely farewell,” The Washington Publish stated. “As Mr. Lieberman plodded through his speech, thanking everybody from his wife to the Capitol maintenance crews, a few longtime friends trickled in.” They included Senators Susan Collins, John Kerry and John McCain.
“The sparse attendance wasn’t unusual for a farewell speech,” The Publish stated, “but it was a sad send-off for a man who was very close in 2000 to becoming a major figure in American political history as the first Jew on a major party’s national ticket. He was denied the vice presidency not by the voters but by the Supreme Court.”
Joseph Isadore Lieberman was born in Stamford, Conn., on Feb. 24, 1942, the oldest of three youngsters of Henry and Marcia (Manger) Lieberman. His father owned a liquor retailer whereas his mom managed the house.
Joe and his sisters, Rietta and Ellen, grew up in a working-class part of Stamford. He attended Burdick Junior Excessive Faculty and Stamford Excessive Faculty, the place he was elected president of his sophomore and senior lessons, joined a debating membership and was salutatorian of the category of 1960.
At Yale, he majored in political science and economics, joined the N.A.A.C.P. and the Democratic Get together and was the editor, chairman and chief editorial author of The Yale Day by day Information, writing about defending the civil rights of Black Southerners. He graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s diploma in 1964 and obtained his legislation diploma from Yale in 1967.
Whereas attending Yale in 1963, Mr. Lieberman grew to become a part of the primary massive group of Northern white college students to journey south for the reason for civil rights, becoming a member of a caravan of greater than younger folks on a 1,300-mile journey from New Haven to Mississippi, the place they inspired Black residents there to register to vote, all whereas enduring harassment by white segregationists.
The episode grew to become a wealthy a part of his political biography throughout the 2000 marketing campaign with Mr. Gore, and Mr. Gore referred to it in an announcement on Wednesday night, saying of Mr. Lieberman: “When he was about to travel to the South to join the civil rights movement in the 1960s, he wrote: ‘I am going because there is much work to be done. I am an American. And this is one nation, or it is nothing.’ Those are the words of a champion of civil rights and a true patriot, which is why I shared that quote when I announced Joe as my running mate.”
Mr. Lieberman’s marriage in 1965 to Betty Haas led to divorce in 1982. That very same 12 months, he married Hadassah Freilich Tucker, a daughter of Holocaust survivors. He’s survived by his spouse; two youngsters from his first marriage, Matthew and Rebecca Lieberman; a daughter from his second marriage, Hana Lieberman; a stepson from his second marriage, Ethan Tucker; two sisters, Rietta Miller and Ellen Lieberman; and 13 grandchildren.
After leaving the Senate in 2013, Mr. Lieberman moved to Riverdale and joined the Manhattan legislation agency Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, which specialised in white-collar protection. Its purchasers included Mr. Trump throughout his years as a bankruptcy-troubled on line casino magnate.
Lately Mr. Lieberman helped lead the bipartisan political group No Labels as its founding chairman and lately as its co-chairman.
In 2017, Mr. Trump interviewed Mr. Lieberman for the place of F.B.I. director, to exchange the fired James Comey, however Mr. Lieberman withdrew from consideration. He criticized Mr. Trump’s retreat from the Paris climate-change accords and his dealing with of the coronavirus pandemic. After Mr. Trump misplaced his 2020 re-election bid, Mr. Lieberman rejected the previous president’s false claims that he had gained.
In an interview with CNN weeks later, Mr. Lieberman denounced Mr. Trump as a risk to democracy. “Trump lost by seven million votes, and he’s hurting our democracy, and frankly hurting himself with this crazy business,” Mr. Lieberman stated. “It’s a terrible thing he’s doing. There is no evidence of fraud.”
Anastasia Marks contributed reporting.
