The page 1 picture in the New York Times and Washington Post on October 3 was a dramatic illustration of why Joe Lieberman is the Republican's favorite Democrat. There he is in the White House Rose Garden, looking approvingly at President Bush in a show of support by legislators for No. 43's plan to invade Iraq. Lieberman gushed about the president's "eloquent, powerful, and convincing statement" in favor of deposing Saddam.

The next time I saw Lieberman, I asked why he was so effusive about the man he hopes to beat in 2004. "I didn't have a text there," he replied testily. "I've felt this way about Iraq for more than a decade. I thought it was real important to have a show of bipartisan support, which will strengthen our hand in the U.N. and might even send a message to Old Saddam over there."

Lieberman has had a number of defining moments as a politician: He scored with the family-values crowd by scolding Hollywood and successfully pushing for the TV V-chip; he was the first Democrat to publicly excoriate his old pal Bill Clinton for l'affaire Lewinsky. And this fall, while Democrats like Tom Daschle and John Kerry twisted themselves into knots trying to reconcile their doubts about the war, Lieberman, who in 1991 co-sponsored the first Gulf War resolution to invade Iraq, had no such crisis. "I'm convinced that if we don't deal with Saddam," he says, "he'll do terrible damage to us and other countries in the region."

Lieberman has crafted an image as a man more interested in getting things done than in scoring partisan points. But as one prominent Washington Democrat says, "Lieberman is not popular in the Senate. When you have 50 Democrats working on a bill, he'll be the first to go and try to cut a deal with the Republicans. He wants to be the Guy, to be a player."

In October, after GOP Senate minority leader Trent Lott let loose on the Senate floor with a scathing attack on Daschle ("Now, I'm not questioning anyone's patriotism"), Lieberman went over and shook Lott's hand. What was that about? Lieberman explained that Lott had consulted him before making those remarks and had pulled some punches, adding, "Lord knows what else he would have said."

During the debate over the Iraq resolution, Maryland Democratic senator Paul Sarbanes became enraged at Lieberman for blocking a Democratic alternative, yelling, "It is painful to see a former attorney and attorney general of the state of Connecticut twist and turn the words of this well-crafted amendment." Lieberman tried to defuse the moment by joking -- "Let me relieve you of your pain" -- but Sarbanes continued to seethe.

Former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt's new book, Take On the Street, attacks Lieberman for halting an effort to require companies to treat stock options as an expense -- a rule that might have discouraged the greedy executive behavior that characterized the Enron scandal. Levitt says, "Joe Lieberman almost single-handedly blocked it. I've never been able to figure out why he did it."

Ask Lieberman about such criticism, and he goes on auto-pilot. "I'm a Democrat who is pro-business and pro-growth. In the early nineties, the ability to own a piece of a business was important to new companies starting to attract talent. . . . Expensing options would have made them less attractive to companies, and fewer would have been issued. . . . The executives abused a good idea." Lieberman, who in August belatedly proposed his own legislation to reform stock options, does not exactly sound contrite.

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Traveling with Lieberman is not for the faint of heart. On one October Sunday, he raced from New Haven to West Simsbury to his birthplace of Stamford to Long Island to attend fund-raisers and to Queens to appear with Carl McCall. Our three-car caravan careered down the highways at 95 miles per hour, forcing other cars off the road. At one stop, in an effort to get Lieberman to slow down, I joked, "I'm not as sure as you are that God is on our side." He laughed, but the speedometer remained sky-high.

Lieberman, astonishingly, never wears a seatbelt. "It's a bad habit I picked up," he says. During the 2000 campaign, he obviously got used to living in "the bubble" -- that protective zone where the Secret Service and staff are responsible for safety and logistics so the great man doesn't have to pay attention. When the trooper put on his siren in gridlock traffic to make the cars part, Lieberman confessed, "This where I turn away and hope nobody recognizes me." While in Stamford, he took a side trip to visit his energetic 88-year-old mother, Marcia, at her white stucco home of 52 years, on a block where neighboring homes are being demolished for a hospital expansion. "Joseph, help me get the cups and saucers down for coffee," she says, bustling about the humble linoleum kitchen, and her son smiles and says to me, "Only my mother calls me Joseph." This is the room where his father, Henry, a liquor-store owner, used to read the New York Times and discuss world events with Joe and his two sisters. The living room, with handsome mahogany furniture, is where Joe planned his first winning political race as a ninth-grader for class president, using a poster of himself perched on the roof of his house with the slogan VOTE FOR ME OR I'LL JUMP.

Even though the Lieberman-family bio was a staple of the 2000 campaign -- his father, who grew up in an orphanage, once made dawn deliveries from a bread truck; his mother had to help support her family after her dad died; Joe was the first to attend college and after Yale law school became a state senator and then Connecticut attorney general -- it's still touching to see the modest home where his journey began.

In the dining room, Marcia Lieberman has laid out a babka and a chocolate cake on the lace-covered table, and she cannot resist the Jewish-mom shtick: "Joseph, you aren't eating, are you watching your diet?" "Mom, I don't want to look too jowly on camera," he says, before happily accepting and devouring a large piece of cake. They have an easy, teasing rapport. She tells me, "I wasn't overcome with grief after the election, because I'm a fatalist. God lets things happen on his own time."

GOP pollster Frank Luntz heard some disturbing anti-Semitic remarks from focus groups during the 2000 election. Luntz, then consulting for MSNBC, said an Arkansas small-town mayor announced, "If Joe Lieberman were a Christian Jew, I could vote for him, but he's one of those religious Jews, so I can't." GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway, then consulting for ABC, said people complained in code words after the VP debate that "Lieberman doesn't have the look of a president. He sounds like a whiner."

Does Lieberman worry his religion will be a problem in a presidential campaign? "It's who I am, and I got this way not from being in a focus group," he says. I mention to Lieberman that I often heard Jews complain that he was "too Jewish." The senator seems more amused than offended. "Oh, no question, the ones most nervous about me running in the first place were Jews," he says. "Because of the whole history, the feeling that Jews will be blamed if things don't go well." He adds, "Why should Jews be blamed any more than Protestants from Texas should be blamed if Bush doesn't do something right? I say to people, 'The non-Jews are willing to judge me on my merits -- why not the Jews?' "

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It's a rainy morning in Washington when I arrive at Lieberman's brick house, one of the more unassuming abodes in this plush gated community in Georgetown with manicured lawns and a neighborhood pool, a bit of safe suburbia in the city. Hadassah greets me at the door, a slender woman in khakis and a black knit shirt with a weary smile. "We could sit in the living room and have a conversation," she suggests, waving toward the cheerful space with a comfy couch, an Oriental rug, and a piano, but then changes her mind, saying, "It's better if we sit in the kitchen with the tape recorder out and I remember it's an interview."

Hadassah was described as unscripted and warm on the campaign trail but seems guarded and tense today. I ask whether religion was an important connection between her and Joe (they married in 1983). "He spent Shabbat the same way I did, and kept a kosher home. But had I not been interested in him, those facts wouldn't have mattered," she snaps. Was she annoyed by the teasing about her unusual name during the campaign, the comedians who joked that the couple has children named B'nai B'rith and United Jewish Appeal? She replies in an icy voice, "Joe will tell you I have a great sense of humor about everything but my name."