Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut’s four-term United States senator and Vice President Al Gore’s Democratic operating mate within the 2000 presidential election, which was received 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 mentioned in a press release that the trigger was issues of a fall. His brother-in-law Ary Freilich mentioned 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 operating 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 group harassed themes of integrity to sidestep the Clinton administration’ scandals, and Mr. Lieberman urged Individuals to carry faith and religion extra prominently into public life.
The ticket received 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 Faculty, and an intense authorized battle took middle stage.
After weeks of dispute, it got here right down to the ends in Florida, the place fewer than 600 votes appeared to separate the opposing candidates. In an unsigned landmark choice on Dec. 12, the USA Supreme Court docket dominated, 5-4, that completely different requirements of recounting in several 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 ranges,” Mr. Lieberman mentioned in a 2023 interview for this obituary. “One was that the Florida Supreme Court docket had already dominated in our favor to proceed the recounts, and the opposite was that it was an extrajudicial political choice made within the disaster of a transition of energy, and out of line with precedents of the Supreme Court docket.”
Mr. Lieberman sought the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination however misplaced a number of primaries and withdrew from the race in February. He believed his help for the conflict in Iraq had doomed his candidacy.
Even his standing with Connecticut voters had slipped. Operating for a fourth Senate time period in 2006, he misplaced the Democratic major to an antiwar candidate however received in a surprising upset within the normal election as a third-party impartial 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 operating mate however in the end selected Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and misplaced the election to Senator Barack Obama.
Mr. Lieberman, a digital outcast in his personal occasion, 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 occasion.
Approaching Senate retirement, he endorsed nobody within the 2012 presidential election, however he supported Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her presidential run towards 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 impartial who wore no labels simply. He known as himself a reform, centrist and average 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 comply with strict Orthodox practices. His household saved a kosher residence and attended Sabbath companies. 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 companies in Georgetown.
Many Democrats criticized Mr. Lieberman’s help for the conflict in Iraq, however admirers mentioned his strengths with voters lay in his rectitude, his spiritual religion and his willingness to compromise.
“He could also be a thoroughgoing average in his politics, however he’s a real conservative in temperament and magnificence,” The New Yorker mentioned in a 2002 profile. “His world is an orderly place the place folks wait in line, take their turns and usually 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 below Senate guidelines to move Mr. Obama’s Inexpensive Care Act in 2010 — a very powerful bundle of well being care laws because the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.
“As a Democrat, Joe wasn’t afraid to interact with Senators from throughout the aisle and labored laborious to earn votes from outdoors his occasion,” Mr. Bush mentioned in a press release after Mr. Lieberman’s demise. “He engaged in critical and considerate debate with opposing voices on essential points.”
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 pupil 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 submit 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 towards 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 p.c 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 really laborious factor for me to do as a result of I preferred him,” he instructed Invoice Kristol, the neoconservative commentator. “However I actually felt what he did was terrible.” A remorseful Mr. Clinton later known as Mr. Lieberman, saying, “I simply need you to know that there’s nothing you mentioned in that speech that I disagree with.”
In 2000, whereas operating for the vice presidency on Mr. Gore’s ticket, Mr. Lieberman concurrently received a 3rd time period within the Senate handily, with 64 p.c of the vote, turning again a problem from the Republican Philip Giordano. However six years later, Mr. Lieberman hit a wall searching for a fourth time period. Ned Lamont, a Greenwich businessman and critic of the Iraq conflict, received 52 p.c of the vote in a major.
Ordinarily, shedding a major is a demise knell: Marketing campaign donations dry up, colleagues and the press flip away, and the loser drops out or runs as an impartial.
Nonetheless, 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 conflict below false pretenses. With extensive 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 inform” Armed Forces coverage, which had compelled homosexual and lesbian service members to be closeted or face discharges.
On Jan. 2, 2013, Mr. Lieberman gave a parting handle within the Senate. “It was a lonely farewell,” The Washington Submit mentioned. “As Mr. Lieberman plodded via his speech, thanking all people from his spouse to the Capitol upkeep crews, just a few longtime pals trickled in.” They included Senators Susan Collins, John Kerry and John McCain.
“The sparse attendance wasn’t uncommon for a farewell speech,” The Submit mentioned, “nevertheless it was a tragic send-off for a person who was very shut in 2000 to changing into a serious determine in American political historical past as the primary Jew on a serious occasion’s nationwide ticket. He was denied the vice presidency not by the voters however by the Supreme Court docket.”
Joseph Isadore Lieberman was born in Stamford, Conn., on Feb. 24, 1942, the oldest of three kids 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 College and Stamford Excessive College, the place he was elected president of his sophomore and senior courses, 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 Occasion 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 acquired his legislation diploma from Yale in 1967.
Whereas attending Yale in 1963, Mr. Lieberman grew to become a part of the primary giant group of Northern white college students to journey south for the reason for civil rights, becoming a member of a caravan of greater than 65 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 through the 2000 marketing campaign with Mr. Gore, and Mr. Gore referred to it in a press release on Wednesday night, saying of Mr. Lieberman: “When he was about to journey to the South to hitch the civil rights motion within the Sixties, he wrote: ‘I’m going as a result of there may be a lot work to be finished. I’m an American. And that is one nation, or it’s nothing.’ These are the phrases of a champion of civil rights and a real patriot, which is why I shared that quote after I introduced Joe as my operating mate.”
Mr. Lieberman’s marriage in 1965 to Betty Haas led to divorce in 1982. That very same yr, he married Hadassah Freilich Tucker, a daughter of Holocaust survivors. He’s survived by his spouse; two kids 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 received.
In an interview with CNN weeks later, Mr. Lieberman denounced Mr. Trump as a risk to democracy. “Trump misplaced by seven million votes, and he’s hurting our democracy, and admittedly hurting himself with this loopy enterprise,” Mr. Lieberman mentioned. “It’s a horrible factor he’s doing. There is no such thing as a proof of fraud.”
Anastasia Marks contributed reporting.
