Joe Lieberman, 2000 vice presidential nominee, dies at 82

Joe Lieberman, a longtime senator from Connecticut who became the first Jewish American to be nominated on a major party’s ticket, died Wednesday. He was 82.

Lieberman’s family stated that he died “due to complications from a fall. He was 82 years old. His beloved wife, Hadassah, and members of his family were with him as he passed.”

Halfway through his 24-year Senate career, Lieberman was chosen as Al Gore’s running mate for the 2000 presidential election. The ticket lost one of the closest elections in American history. “No Jew had ever sought such a lofty office,” wrote the authors of “Jews in American Politics.”

“The net effect of the nomination,” they added, “has been to change the perception of what is possible for Jewish candidates for office for all time.”Four years later, he sought the Democratic nomination for president, without success.Lieberman was known as a hawk on foreign affairs, becoming one of the legislative fathers of the Department of Homeland Security, which was established in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His penchant for aligning himself with two Republican colleagues, Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, particularly when it came to American military policy in Iraq, cost him his party’s Senate nomination in 2006, but he was able to win reelection as an independent.

McCain considered picking Lieberman as his running mate on the 2008 GOP presidential ticket but was persuaded otherwise by Republicans worried that it would cause a rift in the party.

“I completely trusted, liked and worked well with Joe,” McCain wrote in “The Restless Wave.” “And I still believe, whatever the effect it would have had in some quarters of the party, that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would have been received by most Americans as a genuine effort to pull the country together for a change.”