Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic candidate for vice-president in 2000 who had left the party and was backing a third-party bid for the White House this year, has died aged 82.
The former senator from Connecticut died suddenly due to complications from a fall, his family said in a statement on Wednesday. “Senator Lieberman’s love of God, his family and America endured throughout his life in the public interest,” they said.
Lieberman, who embodied the increasingly lonely centre in US politics, was most recently the founding chair of No Labels, a bipartisan group aiming to launch a presidential ticket to challenge Joe Biden and Donald Trump in this year’s election. But the group had yet to find candidates for the campaign.
He was born in 1942 in Stamford, Connecticut, and served in the Senate between 1989 and 2013. In 2000, Al Gore tapped him to be his vice-presidential candidate in their losing campaign against George W Bush and Dick Cheney. He is widely regarded as the first Jewish candidate to be nominated on a major political party ticket.
Although Lieberman was a Democrat for most of his congressional career and supported many of the party’s policies, he won re-election in 2006 as an independent and then endorsed John McCain, the Republican nominee for president in 2008, instead of Democrat Barack Obama. McCain came close to selecting Lieberman as his running mate before picking Alaska governor Sarah Palin.
Obama said in a statement that he “didn’t always see eye-to-eye” with Lieberman, but praised him for an “extraordinary career in public service”. Obama credited Lieberman for his work on repealing the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, which barred openly gay and lesbian individuals from serving in the US military, and helping pass his signature healthcare law.
“In both cases the politics were difficult, but he stuck to his principles because he knew it was the right thing to do,” Obama said.
Lieberman was especially hawkish on foreign policy, which caused profound tensions with much of the Democratic party, which was shifting to the left amid a backlash to the Iraq war. He managed, however, to maintain good relations with many of the Senate’s top figures, and held a coveted post as chair of the Homeland Security committee while Democrats were in the majority.
Tributes to Lieberman poured in from both sides of the political aisle on Wednesday evening. He was “engaged in serious and thoughtful debate with opposing voices on important issues”, George W Bush said in a statement. “And in both loss and victory, Joe Lieberman was always a gentleman.”
“Connecticut is shocked by Senator Lieberman’s sudden passing. In an era of political carbon copies, Joe Lieberman was a singularity. One of one. He fought and won for what he believed was right and for the state he adored,” Chris Murphy, the state’s current Democratic senator, wrote on X.
Lieberman had backed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and Biden four years ago, but launched the No Labels campaign in this election cycle to the frustration of many Democrats concerned that third-party bids could help Trump.
Just a few days ago, Lieberman had reiterated the case for an alternative to a Biden-Trump rematch.
“This whole movement . . . started because our members saw another Trump-Biden race coming and thought the country could do better,” he told Bloomberg television last week. “Trump and Biden . . . means more slash and burn, nastiness, division, partisanship. Whichever one of them gets elected, unfortunately, not much is going to change in Washington.”
Read the full article here
