Moderating and Moralizing, Lieberman Toils in the Center

WASHINGTON — Joe Lieberman is a man of the middle.

For him it is a righteous place where he melds viewpoints to find a voice.

Since he was 13, Lieberman has studied the Talmud, which prompts the examination of what different outlooks have in common. In college, where quotas stamped him an outsider, he rose as a leader by bringing together those around him. His political mentor was a Connecticut ward-heeler who ruled by sharing power with his opponents. As majority leader of his state Senate, he had to reach across the aisle to get things done.

He came to Washington at the start of a blood feud between Democrats and Republicans, and found allies among other Democrats who believed their survival lay at the political center. He engaged in odd-couple politics with conservatives of both parties--with a leading Republican moralist to jab at Hollywood, then with a Louisiana Democrat to fight for education reform.

Most famously, Lieberman scolded his president on the floor of the Senate for his prevarications about an affair with a White House intern. Lieberman's speech, which stopped short of asking the president to step down, helped save the president's job and showed his party the way out of scandal.

Due in large part to his moderating and moralizing, Lieberman became Al Gore's choice for a running mate--and a star among Jewish people. Their immigrant story of persecution and dislocation left an indelible mark on Lieberman, and his appreciation for what America had provided his family would forever propel him.

Still, there were losses, public and private, that stalled his high-reaching life plan. In a short period, he was divorced and lost an election by allowing himself to be pushed to the left. But political adaptability and religious conviction brought him back. He remarried, to a woman who deeply shared his conservative faith and went on to defeat a Republican icon in the U.S. Senate by ridiculing his demeanor and outflanking him on the right.

After he was sworn in as a U.S. senator, his wife, whose family survived the Holocaust, thrust her fist into the air and declared with defiance: "Take that, Hitler."

Like many politicians, Joseph Isador Lieberman, 58, is a man of principle and of calculation. But does he gravitate to the center because it is correct--or because it makes him successful? What is uppermost: to be fair-minded or to win?

That is the Lieberman question.