Joe Lieberman

Joseph Isadore Lieberman (ˈliːbərmən; born February 24, 1942) is an American politician, lobbyist, and attorney who served as a United States senator from Connecticut from 1989 to 2013. A former member of the Democratic Party, he was its nominee for Vice President of the United States in the 2000 U.S. 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. Lieberman was elected as a Reform 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. In the 2000 presidential election, Gore and Lieberman won the popular vote by a margin of more than 500,000 votes but lost the deciding Electoral College to the Republican George W. Bush/Dick Cheney ticket 271–266. 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. Never a member of that party, he remained a registered Democrat while he ran. Lieberman was officially listed in Senate records for the 110th and 111th Congresses 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.