State Comptroller

Wilson has proven he can make a difference

In this year’s race for state comptroller, New Yorkers are fortunate to have one of the strongest candidates for this specific job the state has seen in decades.

Harry Wilson, the Republican candidate,  brings a distinguished career of working for top Wall Street investment firms with a focus on restructuring struggling companies. He took his talents to Washington to work on a bipartisan automotive industry task force, and was the person who successfully guided General Motors through a bankruptcy restructuring.

With Wilson we see a man striking positive qualities. First and foremost, he has the skill and intelligence to oversee the state’s troubled finances, and the experience to run the state’s pension fund.

It’s also worth noting that it’s likely the winner of this race will be working opposite a Democratic governor, which would provide a nice check on that office if a Republican was the comptroller.

Democrat Thomas DiNapoli was given this job four years ago when Alan Hevesi resigned in disgrace. DiNapoli, who had served as an Assemblyman held his own during his tenure, but the truth is he was not the qualified person to take over the job then and he is not today, either.

The Citizen endorses Harry Wilson for state comptroller.

ALBANY - Democrat Andrew Cuomo still holds a commanding lead in the governor’s race, but the contests for attorney general and controller are up in the air heading into Tuesday’s elections, a new poll shows.

Republican controller candidate Harry Wilson has closed a 17-point gap from two weeks ago to draw even with incumbent Democrat Thomas DiNapoli, the Siena College poll released Sunday morning shows. Each now has 44% of the vote.

“It’s clear momentum is on Wilson’s side,” said Siena poll spokesman Steve Greenberg.

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In the hyper-competitive and cutthroat world of Wall Street, Harry Wilson was a star.

In a meteoric 15-year career, he leapfrogged from one prestigious firm to another — Goldman Sachs, Blackstone Group and Silver Point Capital — earning more than $20 million and admiration from the industry’s power players.

“I would say that Harry was one of the top two or three people that came through Blackstone at his level,” said Bret D. Pearlman, a former Blackstone senior executive who spent 15 years at the firm and helped hire Mr. Wilson when he graduated from Harvard Business School. “He combined smarts with a tireless work ethic and had insights well beyond his years.”

Mr. Wilson specialized in restructuring troubled companies, and last year, with the financial crisis still reverberating, he set his sights on rescuing another floundering institution: New York State.

After leaving the financial world at 36and completing a much-praised turn on President Obama’s auto-industry task force, he decided to run for state comptroller, New York’s chief financial officer.

In dire times, he believed, voters would choose a financial professional to manage the state’s finances.

Mr. Wilson, the Republican candidate, who is financing much of the race himself, said that he intended to turn the comptroller’s office from what he has described as a backwater of state government into a powerful post that will play a leading role in cutting taxes and spending. He has been endorsed by The New York Times, The New York Daily News and The New York Post, but trails in polls.

While Mr. Wilson, who is 38, has boasted of his credentials as a financier, Thomas P. DiNapoli, the Democratic incumbent, has used those credentials to bludgeon him. He has painted Mr. Wilson as an out-of-touch hedge fund tycoon whose “Wall Street values” make him unsuitable for public office. In their only televised debate, Mr. DiNapoli cited “Wall Street” four times in a one-minute opening statement.

Even though Mr. Wilson calls Mr. DiNapoli’s attacks unfair, they have at times forced him to edge away from citing his own career. In a recent advertisement, he introduced himself as “a fiscal expert,” a clunky phrase that reduced his glittering résumé to a euphemism.

He has fought back, dismissing Mr. DiNapoli as a financial novice and seeking to link him to his predecessor, Alan G. Hevesi, who resigned in disgrace in 2007, by bringing up Mr. DiNapoli’s meetings with investment placement agents soon after taking office.

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo cleared Mr. DiNapoli of any wrongdoing the same day that Mr. Hevesi pleaded guilty two weeks ago to taking part in a sprawling corruption scheme involving the public pension fund.

But Mr. Wilson, more wonk than firebrand, has struggled to gain traction, with a poll this week showing that most voters still were not familiar with him.

“He hasn’t succeeded in breaking through the clutter for the public to even figure out who he is,” said Scott Levenson of the Advance Group, a political consulting firm.

In white papers and policy reports, Mr. Wilson has outlined bold plans to revamp the comptroller’s office, winning praise from economists and pension experts. He wants to drastically expand the office’s audit function, throw out traditional accounting practices for public pensions that he says distort performance and lower the assumed rate of return on the fund’s investments.

Mr. Wilson’s campaign has money — $2.6 million on hand, compared with $1.4 million for Mr. DiNapoli, according to the most recent disclosure reports — and Mr. Wilson said he planned to increase spending in the final days of the campaign. Since January, Mr. Wilson has lent his campaign at least $2.75 million.

Although Mr. Wilson has been interested in politics all his life, his first taste of political campaigning has left him exasperated with the no-holds-barred tactics of a statewide race.

“Whether it’s accurate or not, whether it’s telling or not, he’s going to try to distort everything I’ve ever done in my life,” Mr. Wilson said of his opponent in a recent interview.

Mr. Wilson’s ascent follows an American archetype: the son of working-class parents; the first in his family to go to college; a self-made millionaire.

He traces his values not to Wall Street, but 200 miles north, to Johnstown, N.Y. a city of tanneries and textile mills, where he grew up watching his father work double shifts as a bartender and his mother, a Greek immigrant, fret over money.

The Wilsons’ life revolved around the Rainbow, a Main Street restaurant owned by Mr. Wilson’s uncle, Pete, where his father worked and where Harry helped bus tables and wash dishes through high school. The Rainbow also doubled as the clubhouse for the localRepublican Party, offering Mr. Wilson an early exposure to conservative politics.

From Johnstown, he went to Harvard, and then to Goldman Sachs, where he worked in the prestigious investment-banking-analyst program. He moved on to Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a New York private-equity firm, before enrolling at Harvard Business School.

His business school classmates were impressed by his intelligence and exhausted by his appetite for endless study sessions. When his classmates gathered for goodbyes and toasts on the final day, Paul Lehman, a class officer, stood up to salute him.

Mr. Lehman held up a $100 check he had written on the spot, made out to “Harry Wilson for President.” The room rang with applause.

Despite his interest in running for office, Mr. Wilson’s experience growing up in a family that worried about its budget made him determined to earn a lot of money before entering government.

“If I was going to go into public life, I was going to build enough of a nest egg to take care of my family first,” said Mr. Wilson, who still looks the part of an investment banker, sporting Ferragamo ties and a Timex Ironman watch — both de rigueur Wall Street accessories.

After a stint at Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private-equity firm, where he worked on a team that pushed the firm into distressed-debt investing, he left to join Edward A. Mule, a mentor from Goldman Sachs. Mr. Mule was starting his own hedge fund, Silver Point, where Mr. Wilson went on to earn more than $20 million, according to documents released by his campaign. He left Silver Point in 2008 because he wanted to spend more time with his three young daughters (he now has four) and, he said, “I felt I was insufficiently giving back.”

He has maintained close ties to the financial elite, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has endorsed him.

In January 2009, Mr. Wilson’s first foray into public life began with a blind e-mail offering his expertise to Steven Rattner, the high-profile financier then gearing up to lead the White House’s efforts to overhaul the auto industry.

Although Mr. Rattner had never heard of Mr. Wilson, he was impressed with his credentials and quickly brought him into the team. Mr. Wilson went to Detroit, where he worked grueling hours to restructure General Motors.

While Mr. Wilson’s highly praised performance earned him job offers he called “far more lucrative” than the comptroller’s office, he became fixed on the idea of helping to solve New York’s fiscal problems.
But his crash course in bare-knuckle New York politics — the taunts of “Hedge Fund Harry” and “Don Juan of Wall Street,” the false rumors that he was fired from his last job — has been disillusioning.
“I didn’t appreciate how broken this was until I was in it,” he said. “This is why good people don’t go into public life.”

Republican comptroller hopeful Harry Wilson today picked up the endorsement of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the pro-business group Unshackle Upstate.

“Harry Wilson is an extremely impressive individual with the ideal qualifications to serve as our next state comptroller,” Giuliani said in a statement. “He understands how to make broken organizations work again, and there is no entity more broken right now than New York State government. I believe that the voters will recognize the enormous potential that Harry brings to the table, and they will elect him overwhelmingly in November. Harry Wilson has the skills to revolutionize the function of the New York State comptroller’s office to better serve the taxpayers.”

One of the more recent candidates Giuliani endorsed for statewide office, David Malpass, didn’t fare so well. He lost a close primary battle against former Rep. Joseph DioGuardi for the GOP line to challenge U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

In its endorsement, Rochester-based Unshackle Upstate said Wilson, a former hedge-fund manager from Scarsdale, Westchester County, “has been one of the most refreshing we’ve heard from any candidate for office at any level of government in quite some time.”

Wilson’s talents and experience are superbly suited to the job

In the first public debate for state comptroller, the two candidates clarified the choice facing voters. Incumbent Thomas DiNapoli repeatedly characterized his opponent, Harry Wilson, as “a wizard of Wall Street.” The challenger disparaged Mr. DiNapoli as “a creature of Albany.”

For the job of investing the $125 billion state pension fund and auditing state spending, we’ll take the wizard.

From humble beginnings, Mr. Wilson became an academic star, earning Harvard degrees on scholarships, then making a fortune in finance. As the only Republican on President Barack Obama’s auto task force, Mr. Wilson played a key role in returning General Motors to profit.

Mr. Wilson, 38, has demonstrated a knack for fixing troubled companies by improving management practices and company culture. State agencies, Medicaid and other programs, and school districts would benefit from his expertise. Unlike typical Republican candidates, Mr. Wilson does not claim that tax cuts will solve our problems—he says that solving our problems would allow for tax cuts. He is no slave to political ideology.

Voters following the race should look past the name-calling, which plays on legitimate public antipathy toward Wall Street and Albany. Not all hedge fund partners are reckless swindlers destroying the economy. Not all Albany politicians are corrupt schemers bankrupting the state.

Mr. DiNapoli, appointed by Assembly colleagues to succeed disgraced comptroller Alan Hevesi in 2007, has been trying to do the right thing. His reforms—such as banning middlemen from arranging deals with the pension fund—have aimed to insulate his office from the kind of corruption that brought down his predecessor. Mr. DiNapoli initially rejected campaign contributions above $10,000, though he abandoned that limit when his fundraising faltered. And he has dutifully warned of risky budgeting by his former colleagues, despite supporting such practices as a legislator.

However, there is nothing in Mr. DiNapoli’s background to suggest he is cut out to be comptroller. Mr. Wilson’s talents and experience, in contrast, are superbly suited to the job. His financial acumen would let him lead rather than be steered by the staff that manages the pension fund.

Mr. DiNapoli is fond of warning that “Hedge Fund Harry” would hand the pension fund to his “Wall Street buddies,” but in fact Mr. Wilson proposes to do the opposite—to move assets into fixed-income and low-cost index funds over time. It is Mr. DiNapoli who favors the riskier strategies that enrich financial firms. His warnings about Mr. Wilson are disingenuous and hypocritical.

Mr. Wilson promises to be a greater check on Albany’s fiscal abuses than past comptrollers have been. He would refuse to sign off on imprudent borrowing and other legerdemain that lawmakers use to disguise dishonest budgeting. Critics say comptrollers lack such power, but we’re eager to see what Mr. Wilson can do.

Harry Wilson has the courage, talent and independence to invest responsibly, and the skill to excel at the other elements of the job. We strongly endorse him for state comptroller.

New York needs a controller who knows what he’s doing.

New York needs a controller who can rescue the office from the hash made of it by the corrupt Alan Hevesi and the underqualified Tom DiNapoli.

New York needs a controller who can be a force for reinventing state government, in the process lifting dead weight from taxpayers’ shoulders.

Give the job to Harry Wilson. Superbly qualified, and brimming with cogent, ambitious plans, Wilson is by far the best choice for these times.

Charged with safely growing New York’s $125 billion pension fund, the next controller must have the ins and outs of money management down cold. Wilson fits the bill perfectly, having prospered at four of the world’s smartest investment houses.

Charged with rescuing New York from insolvency as the state’s chief fiscal officer, the next controller must lead the way toward streamlining Albany. Wilson proved his turnaround skills in helping to run the Obama administration task force that rescued the U.S. auto industry.

Charged with ferreting out waste as chief auditor, the next controller must follow the money and report back without fear or favor. On this score, Wilson is the ultimate Capitol outsider: a self-made man with zero ties to the corrupt old guard.

Newcomer to politics that he is, Wilson would apply fresh, astute ideas to banish the same-old, same-old ways of doing business.

Most importantly, his strategy for serving as sole trustee of the pension fund is dead-on right.

He would shock Albany - and New Yorkers at large - by presenting a truthful accounting of the retirement system’s costs, along with the means to meet the expenses without raising taxes.

He would shift investments away from the fantasy of scoring outsized returns on risky bets, a move that would save hundreds of millions of dollars that flow to private advisers at little or no gain to the retirement system.

He would establish an independent board to scrutinize the wisdom and propriety of handing pension money over to anyone.

He would document why New York must shift to providing 401(k)-style retirement savings accounts to newly hired workers.

Wilson, a Republican, is challenging DiNapoli, a Democrat. The winner will serve beside the incoming governor, presumably Andrew Cuomo. Most tellingly, Cuomo has declined to endorse fellow Democrat DiNapoli.

To do so would be to severely undercut Cuomo’s central thrust - that he will be the leader who finally defeats the Albany special interests to usher in a new day of taxpayer-friendly, merit-based governing.

Clearly, Cuomo knows that DiNapoli was ill-prepared to serve when pals in the Assembly appointed him to serve out Hevesi’s term after Hevesi was revealed to be a crook.

DiNapoli had one qualification: He had affably bided his time as a member of the Assembly for nine terms. He had never managed so much as a mom-and-pop store - nor did he have the slightest bit of financial experience.

You wouldn’t have hired DiNapoli to handle a dime of your retirement savings, let alone $125 billion.

And you still wouldn’t, because his performance fell beneath low expectations.

As but one example: DiNapoli’s returns on pension investments have lagged behind those of other large public retirement systems, costing the fund hundreds of millions of dollars.

Wilson is not just an alternative. He’s an excellent alternative. So who is the guy?

The son of Greek immigrants, Wilson grew up in Johnstown, a city of 8,000 west of Albany. His roots are working-class. His father was a bartender; his mother operated a sewing machine.

President George H.W. Bush named Wilson a presidential scholar when Wilson was a senior in high school, a distinction earned by only 141 students that year. Subsequently, Wilson graduated from both Harvard College and Harvard Business School. Then he made his mark at the top ranks of New York’s financial industry.

In 2009, Wilson volunteered for the task force established by President Obama when General Motors and Chrysler verged on liquidations that would have thrown hundreds of thousands out of work and further pounded the economy.

The lone Republican in the group, Wilson was key to restructuring GM so the company is now competitive and will likely prove a profit-making investment for taxpayers. New Yorkers need him to do the same for this state.

Harry Wilson

New Yorkers will soon elect the first comptroller since Alan Hevesi disgraced the job. Almost four years ago, Mr. Hevesi was replaced by Thomas DiNapoli, who was picked by fellow Democrats in the State Legislature.

Mr. DiNapoli, who started with little experience or knowledge of finance, has been a worthy caretaker. New Yorkers, however, have a chance to choose someone who knows finance and is not beholden to the Democrats in control in Albany.

That person is the Republican candidate, Harry Wilson, who helped turn around General Motors last year.

Mr. DiNapoli has made some helpful changes in the comptroller’s office in an effort to shield the $125 billion pension fund from political influence. He has also repeatedly warned about problems in the state budget. But he adopted a questionable plan from the pension fund, and he has failed to push hard enough to create public campaign financing for the comptroller’s office.

It is rare for someone of Mr. Wilson’s talents and expertise to compete for one of the most important and least glamorous jobs in state politics.

Mr. Wilson went to Harvard Business School and worked for Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group and Silver Point Capital. Mr. DiNapoli tries to make that résumé sound tainted, but the investment and management skills exhibited with General Motors are just what are needed for New York’s financial and ethical blight.

Mr. Wilson promises to strengthen ethics rules, make better audits of state agencies and drastically reduce the $350 million a year in investment fees paid for the state’s pension fund.

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