updateFormer U.S. senator and vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman has died. According to his family, complications after a fall proved fatal. He was 82 years old.
In 2000, Lieberman ran for vice president of the United States. Presidential candidate Al Gore ultimately lost the election to George W. Bush. Four years later, Lieberman ran for president, but failed in the primaries.
Lieberman was born in 1942 in the American state of Connecticut. He was first elected senator in that state in 1970. One of the volunteers who went door to door to solicit votes for Lieberman was the later Democratic president Bill Clinton, then a law student at Yale University. Lieberman spent ten years in the Connecticut Senate. In 1989, he defeated an incumbent Republican and won the national Senate. He would remain there until 2013.
Lieberman considered himself a Democrat, although he regularly clashed with his party. After supporting the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he lost support from the Democratic party in his home state of Connecticut in 2006. He decided to run for re-election as an independent candidate and was elected, thanks in part to support from independent and Republican voters.
Support for McCain
In 2008, Lieberman shocked the Democratic party again by endorsing Republican Senator John McCain’s candidacy for president. According to Lieberman, Democrat Barack Obama, who would ultimately be elected, was not experienced enough.
McCain is even said to have considered making Lieberman his running mate, which would have given him another shot at the vice presidency. But McCain’s advisors put a stop to that, in view of Lieberman’s past as a Democrat and his progressive positions on issues such as abortion. McCain ultimately chose then-Republican Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska.
Lieberman was politically active until his death. This year he tried to get an independent candidate on the ballots who could compete against Joe Biden and Donald Trump in November. This was once again against the sore leg of his former party, the Democrats: after all, every vote for an independent candidate is one less vote for Biden.
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