Richard Lamm

Richard Lamm: Profile

Lamm has appeared on virtually every national news program, including Buchanan & Press, Larry King Live, Inside Politics, Today, Meet the Press, Good Morning America, Lehrer NewsHour, and Face the Nation. His editorials have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, as well as in a number of academic and medical journals. While Governor, Lamm wrote or co-authored six books: A California Conspiracy, with Arnold Grossman (St. Martin's Press, 1988); Megatraumas: America in the Year 2000 (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America, with Gary Imhoff (Dutton and Company, 1985), 1988, with Arnie Grossman (St. Martin's Press, 1985), Pioneers & Politicians, with Duane A. Smith (Pruett Publishing Company, 1984) and The Angry West, with Michael McCarthy (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982). Since then, he has authored several other titles, including Two Wands, One Nation: An Essay on Race and Community in America (2006) and Condition Critical: A New Moral Vision for Health Care (2007).

Lamm has always been in the forefront of political change. As a first year legislator, he drafted and succeeded in passing the nation's first liberalized abortion law. He was an early leader of the environmental movement, and was President of the First National Conference on Population and The Environment. Reacting to the high cost of campaigning, he walked the state in his campaign for Governor of Colorado. Lamm was elected to three terms as Colorado's top elected official, and in serving as Governor from January 1975 and retiring in January 1987, he was the longest-serving Governor in Colorado's history to that date.

Richard Lamm is one of a new breed of policy analysts who argues that the challenge our age is to meet new public needs with ever more limited resources. Public policy, he maintains, "cannot count on historic revenue growth and, thus, cannot chase geometric curves of public spending." Lamm moves beyond traditional liberalism and conservatism to urge that the task before us is "to reconceptualize much of what government does and how it does it."