A new 'season' for Lieberman

Stamford - With family and flags arrayed behind him, it almost looked as if U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman was embarked on a new campaign, the latest in a political career four decades long.

But Lieberman won't be running this time. The senator who has charmed, baffled and polarized political players and observers in this state for years was addressing a packed house of family, friends and supporters to announce that he will not seek a fifth term in the Senate in 2012.

It was a Lieberman event, through and through. The senator's liberal Democratic critics quietly rejoiced, some taking to the blogs Lieberman has come to dread and resent. His most ardent supporters and defenders warned that, occasional disagreements aside, his character and expertise would be missed.

And Lieberman himself sounded notes of patriotism and a particular brand of genial defiance - leaving, he said, in accordance with no less an authority than Scripture.

The senator quoted from Ecclesiastes: "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven."

"At the end of this term, I will have served 24 years in the U.S. Senate and 40 years in elective office," Lieberman said. "By my count, I have run at least 15 full-fledged campaigns and that's just in Connecticut, not counting the national campaigns I was involved in. So for me, it is time for another season and another purpose under Heaven."

A crowd of well-wishers packed Salon F in the downtown Marriott, a location that Lieberman quickly informed the group was more than just an available ballroom. The hulking concrete hotel sits, he said, on the site once occupied by 42 Hawthorne St., the house in which Lieberman and his family spent his first eight years, before the neighborhood was razed, like so many others in Connecticut's urban centers, for "urban renewal."

"As I think about the journey I have traveled from my childhood to this day, I can't help but also think about my four grandparents and the journey they traveled more than a century ago, as immigrants to this country," Lieberman said. "They came to America seeking freedom and they found it. They came to America hoping for opportunity and they got it. But even they could not have dreamed that their grandson would end up as a U.S. senator and incidentally a barrier-breaking candidate for vice president of the United States."

Standing behind and beside him on a stage bedecked with American and state flags were Lieberman's wife, Hadassah, and their children and grandchildren, whom Lieberman introduced one by one. (He had already been introduced by his wife, as "Joey.")

Soon after he took office, Lieberman said, he and Hadassah had discussed how long he intended to serve.

Lieberman's response, he joked, was, "I promise you that when Regis leaves television, I'll leave the Senate. And here we are."

Regis Philbin, the longtime television host and Greenwich resident, announced his retirement Tuesday.

"Maybe he and I will be hanging out together now," Lieberman joked.

The senator did not shy away from the key issue that has separated him, with seemingly growing bitterness on both sides, from the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party.

Lieberman lost a Democratic primary to newcomer Ned Lamont in 2006, primarily over Lieberman's support for the war in Iraq and the foreign policy priorities of the Bush Administration.

In his remarks, he pronounced himself "proud of my work across party lines" in support of the foreign policies of various presidents, including Bush and President Barack Obama. His votes and others, he said, have "liberated Iraq, Afghanistan, and the world from brutally repressive, anti-American dictatorships."

But the wound to his relationship with the Democratic base, once struck, was seemingly permanent.

Even before that, however, Lieberman has long had a wary, restive relationship with some in the Democratic party base.

The then-attorney general defeated liberal Republican Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. in 1988, and soon showed evidence of the hawkish and socially conservative streak that would so deeply frustrate many in his party almost 20 years later.

Lieberman backed the first President Bush on foreign policy and voted in favor of the first Gulf War in 1991, when other members of the party voted against it. During the Clinton administration, Lieberman increasingly took on marketers of violent or sexually suggestive entertainment products, and was the first Democrat to denounce Clinton for his affair with an intern, behavior Lieberman called "immoral."

Lieberman soon found himself tapped as the running mate of Vice President Al Gore in 2000, and later attempted his own presidential run in 2004, sputtering out in New Hampshire.

Soon, with the Iraq war reaching the height of its unpopularity and Lieberman increasingly defending the second President Bush and his prosecution of the war, the senator ran aground with the voters of his own party. He lost the 2006 primary to Lamont, and only won re-election by forming his own party, Connecticut for Lieberman, and spending more than $20 million on his campaign, a state record that stood until last year.

Lieberman's clashes with liberals and Democrats continued in 2008, when he campaigned for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain, and in 2010, when he helped defeat a proposed "public option" for health insurance coverage in the Obama administration's reform bill.

The often fraught relationship was evident Wednesday in reactions to Lieberman's decision to call it quits. The atmosphere in the hotel conference room in Stamford was busy and warm, but the usual obligatory flood of congratulations from other party officeholders was lighter than usual.

When news of Lieberman's planned retirement broke late Tuesday, liberal bloggers and Tweeters rejoiced. The crowd at his announcement included some of the very bloggers who had hounded Lieberman during the 2006 campaign - and whom the senator derided at the time - seemingly present to celebrate his retirement.

Like his former colleague, Sen. Chris Dodd, before him, Lieberman took his leave while announcing that reports of his political demise were greatly exaggerated.

"I know that some people have said that if I ran for re-election, it would be a difficult campaign for me," the senator said. "So what else is new? ... I have never shied from a good fight, and I never will."

Sitting in the crowd, Claire Nathan said she was sorry to see Lieberman go.

Nathan, a part-time social worker and real estate agent at Sotheby's, said she had first worked with the senator in 1997. A client of a social service agency in Stamford who had suffered a stroke early in life had been helped back to his feet, and secured a job stocking shelves in a pharmacy, only to have the Internal Revenue Service come after him for back taxes the man's ex-wife had not paid, Nathan said.

She called Lieberman's office.

"Joe Lieberman's office got my letter on Tuesday, and on Monday I got call from the office saying, 'All done, not to worry,'" she said.

"For me it's very sad," said Nathan, who is now, since Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, moved back to his hometown after the 2006 race, the senator's next-door neighbor. "I think he's a very effective legislator, and I hate to see one of the ones that actually gets something done leaving."

New London Democratic Chairman William Satti drove to Stamford for Lieberman's speech, and he offered a practical reason for the state to rue the departure of Lieberman and Dodd in such quick succession: The state will have lost 54 years of Senate seniority in two quick years, a potential drawback if Connecticut again faces efforts to close the Naval Submarine Base in Groton.

"It's one thing the state definitely needs to be concerned about," Satti said.

"Nice people are hard to come by in politics," said Roy Occhiogrosso, an aide to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who worked for Lieberman in past campaigns.

Asked if some of Lieberman's fiercest opponents understood that niceness, Occhiogrosso replied, "No, they don't."

"I don't agree with what he does, sometimes occasionally, sometimes more than occasionally," he said. "But he is a very decent, kind person. People who disagree with him sometimes can't understand how people who know him can say that. But just because they disagree with him doesn't mean he's not a nice guy."

While Lieberman's position on the Iraq war and some of his rhetoric during the health care reform debate cost him supporters, "it was his decision to endorse and speak at the Republican convention, I think, that hurt a lot of Democrats," said John Olsen, the president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO and a former state party chairman.

Olsen and his union were staunch defenders of the incumbent during Lamont's 2006 primary challenge, with Olsen arguing forcefully during that contest that the state couldn't afford to lose an experienced senator with years of seniority under his belt.

"It was a very, very tough time for him and everyone else, but I think if you ask him, he did it because of what's best for the country," Olsen said.

t.mann@theday.com