Joseph Isadore Lieberman, (born February 24, 1942) is a Democratic U.S. senator from Connecticut, best known as Al Gore's running mate on the Democratic ticket in 2000. The religiously-observant Lieberman was the first Jewish person nominated for Vice President of the United States by a major party. He is also the first Jew to win the popular vote in a national election. In 2004, Lieberman campaigned for the Democratic nomination for President, but did not gain enough support from primary voters, and dropped out of the race.

Lieberman defeated liberal Republican Lowell Weicker to win election to the United States Senate in 1988 and was re-elected in 1994 and 2000. Like Bill Clinton and Dick Gephardt, Lieberman served as a stint as chairman of the influential Democratic Leadership Council, a group of Democrats that states as its goal to, "reshapAmerican politics by moving it beyond the old left-right debate." [http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=86&subid=85&contentid=893

Similarly, Lieberman is a politician that some find hard to classify in left-right terms: Because of his internationalist foreign policy stance and working in coalitions with Republicans, Lieberman is often viewed as one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. On domestic issues in particular, however, his voting record is generally in line with that of other Democrats, and he has consistently received a high rating from the Americans for Democratic Action and a low rating from the American Conservative Union Some of his critics argue that these scorecards fail to capture the substance of his record on votes that really matter. New Republic have argued the converse: that how one votes is how one should be judged and that Lieberman's critics have been "one-dimensional" in their analysis of his political beliefs. [http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060116&s=trb011606" target="_blank" >^*

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