(New York) Former US senator Joe Lieberman, Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 presidential election, died Wednesday at age 82, his family announced.
He died in New York in the afternoon “following complications related to a fall,” she said in a statement.
The Yale University law graduate was first an elected official in Connecticut, then the state’s top prosecutor, before winning a Senate seat for the first time in 1988 on a Democratic ticket.
Modest, often smiling and rarely losing his cool, Joe Lieberman was a moderate voice when the divide between the two parties began to widen in the 1990s.
In 1988, he was the first Senate Democrat to sharply criticize President Bill Clinton over his scandal-ridden affair with Monica Lewinsky, although Lieberman stopped short of calling for his impeachment.
This compromise position led Al Gore to choose Lieberman as his Democratic running mate in the 2000 presidential election, making him the first Jew to run for vice president.
They won the national popular vote, but lost the Electoral College election, after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Republicans following a historic ballot-counting imbroglio in Florida.
In the years that followed, Joe Lieberman shocked his party by staunchly defending George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After losing the Democratic primary for re-election in his home state of Connecticut in 2006, he left the party and ran as an independent, managing to win back the seat with the help of conservative voters.
He left Congress in 2013.