Senator Lorraine Wojahn

esolved and how different elected officials operated. That was when I learned that most elected officials
work very hard. There are a few with compromised ethics and inflated views of themselves, but the
majority - by far - care about doing what they perceive is the right thing. Senator Wojahn ignored egos,
gender, wealth and opinion polls. She was a trailblazing woman we all should recognize and thank.
JEAN SOLIZ-CONKLIN
Former Senate Counsel
FOREWORD
State Senator R. Lorraine Wojahn’s political career stands as evidence that it may not be easy, but public
service can hue to the highest calling of compassion. From the poor to the mentally ill, from the
displaced homemaker to the defenseless crack baby, Senator Wojahn stood for fair and compassionate
treatment of the least among us. Her works stand as an example of public service that lifts up our state,
and makes us proud to choose this as our home.
This book will tell her life’s stories and many of her accomplishments. I want you to know the spirit I
saw in my years with her. As our State Senate’s Health Committee Chair and Ranking Minority member
for a decade from the late 1980s onward, I worked with a Senator often as regal in her style as she could
be sensitive and compassionate in her legislative aims. In a strategy session early in my time with her, I
advised her of the impossibility of breaching legislative customs by requiring accountability for certain
specific performance from our state’s largest social and health services agency. She leaned toward me,
back stiffened, eyes wide, more than a little annoyed and loudly declared, “There is nothing we cannot
do. We are the Senate!”
As clearly as she could demonstrate compassion and understanding in her legislative purposes, and as
often as she would champion the interests of society’s least able to defend themselves, Senator Wojahn
knew how brutal the political world could be. And she came to play. By the time I worked with her, she
had learned especially how to be successful in the man’s political world of liberal politicians of the late
twentieth century. She could be as blunt, intimidating and effective in her actions against her foes as a
longshoreman with a tire iron.
My first chance to observe the Senator’s political style involved recommendations I had made as a
performance auditor examining our state Board of Health. I had recommended the Board’s modification
and refocusing. But a bill had just cleared the State House emasculating the Board entirely. I was
summoned to the Senator’s office. When I entered, I recognized a who’s who of physician, hospital and
other medical system lobbyists, along with a few politically naive public health activists. Despite their
considerable political influence, most in the room had no strong interest in the state Board of
Health. They were there because Senator Wojahn had told them to be. She told them she had determined
to stop that House bill dead in its tracks, and they were to help. The Senator was successful in that effort
when a new Senate bill appeared in a Senate Committee completely unrelated to health issues and
separate from the House bill. The House bill just mysteriously died after having been referred to that non
health committee and bottled up by its Chair, as a favor.
The upshot of that brief meeting in Senator Wojahn’s office was the redirection of the State Board of
Health, the state’s public health community favored, but could never have accomplished on their
own. This led to a political alliance that some years later, despite initial opposition by the sitting
Governor of her own political party, produced the first comprehensive state legislative policy to limit the
spread of HIV/AIDS, to the creation of the first state health department to be reestablished in any state
in more than 30 years, and to the end of any further health legislation authored by the House member
who had authored that bill for as long and as far as Senator Wojahn’s reach could grasp. Years later, as
Senate Health Committee Staff Director, I must say I had great difficulty explaining to proponents of
perfectly benign legislation authored by that House member why their bill would not be heard in Senator
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