He served three terms as the 38th Governor of Colorado as a Democrat (1975–1987) and ran for the Reform Party's nomination for President of the United States in 1996.

[10] In 1998 she won the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate from Colorado, but lost in the general election to incumbent Republican Ben Nighthorse Campbell.

[11] Lamm was selected as one of Time Magazine's "200 Young Leaders of America" in 1974,[12] and won the Christian Science Monitor "Peace 2020" essay in 1985.

[13] He was Chairman of the Pew Health Professions Commission and a public member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

[18] As candidate and then governor, Lamm promised for environmental reasons to "drive a silver stake" through plans to build Interstate 470, a proposed circumferential highway around the southwest part of the Denver Metropolitan Area.

Lamm later explained that he "was essentially raising a general statement about the human condition, not beating up on the elderly," and that the exact phrasing in the speech was "We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.

"[21] His dire predictions for the future of social security and health care ("duty to die") earned him the nickname "Governor Gloom".

In early August, Lamm picked former California Republican congressman Ed Zschau, a high-tech millionaire and proven fund-raiser, to be his running mate on his would-be presidential ticket.

The resulting novel, 1988, is a story about a former Democratic governor of Texas running for U.S. President on a populist, third-party ticket, declaring himself a "progressive conservative."

[14] A voluminous writer, Lamm's other works include Population and the Law (1972), Some Reflections on the Balkanization of America (1978), Megatraumas: America at the Year 2000 (1980),[27] Energy Activities in the West (1980), The Angry West: A Vulnerable Land and Its Future (1982), Campaign for Quality: An Education Agenda for the 80's (1983), Pioneers and Politicians: Ten Colorado Governors in Profile (1984), Copernican Politics (1984), The American West: A poem (1985), Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America (1985), The Lamm Administration: A Retrospective (1986), California Conspiracy (1988), Hard Choices (1989), Crisis: The Uncompetitive Society (1989), The fall and Rise of the American Economy (1989), Indicators of Decline: An article from The Futurist (1993), The Supply Factor in Health Care Cost Containment (1993), The Ethics of Excess: An article from The Hastings Center Report (1994), Health Care Workforce Reform.

(Fulcrum Publishing, ISBN 1-55591-510-8) Lamm also served on the board of directors of American Water Development Inc, along with, among others, Maurice Strong, Samuel Belzberg, Alexander Crutchfield, and William Ruckelshaus.

[citation needed] In 2005, a 2004 speech by Lamm titled "I Have a Plan to Destroy America," became famous after being frequently forwarded as an email; in the talk he criticized multiculturalism.

[32] In 2006, he gave a controversial speech on the theme of his recently released book, Two Wands, One Nation, arguing that black and Hispanic Americans should embrace "Japanese or Jewish values".