Harry Wilson

I wanted to alert you all to a race that is often below the radar screen but has recently become one of the most important race for education reform in New York State this year: New York State Comptroller, the chief fiscal officer of the state.  I'm supporting Harry Wilson, who is (I hope you're sitting down) a Republican.  (When the Democratic candidate is terrible on school reform – and every other issue – I'll gladly support a Republican.)  Attached is an invite for an event for him in NYC this coming Wed. evening – I hope you can make it!

 

Harry is a career investor and restructuring expert who is the nominee of three separate political parties – the Republican, Independence and Conservative parties, respectively the 2nd, 3rd and 4th largest parties in the state. He is the only candidate, for any office, to have received the backing of three of the top four parties and is widely considered the Republican most likely to win this November.

 

Harry is the son and grandson of working class Greek immigrants. The first in his family to go to college, he graduated from Harvard and Harvard Business School. Harry spent his business career primarily as an investor, frequently investing in distressed companies and pursuing a financial and operational restructuring, at four world-class firms: Goldman, Sachs, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, Blackstone, and Silver Point Capital.

 

Harry's first foray into public service came last year, when he crossed party lines to serve in the Obama Administration, on the Auto Task Force. He was the only Republican in the team's senior leadership and led all of the Task Force's business and financial work as a result of his deep restructuring experience. He opposed the Chrysler deal but led the General Motors deal, the largest industrial restructuring in American history. As a result of that restructuring, GM now has the lowest cost structure in the auto industry, is profitable, has more cash than debt and has grown market share for the first time in 30 years.

 

Harry now wants to do the same thing in New York State, combining an expansive view of the Comptroller's underutilized audit power with his business and restructuring skills to get New York back on track. He wants to recreate the Comptroller's office, a partisan backwater for years, into a nonpartisan, professional office focused on fiscal responsibility and reform. You don't need to do anything more than read the headlines to know our state desperately needs both.

 

More importantly, from my perspective, is that Harry has been a supporter of education reform his whole adult life. Harry credits education with his own life living the American Dream. When he first arrived in New York City in 1993, after college, he was horrified to learn the awful public education statistics that we know all too well. As a result, he got involved with Student Sponsor Partners (SSP), a charity that pairs donors with youth where the donors pick up the cost of parochial high school. He and his wife worked with a number of SSP students over the years and liked their work so much that his wife, Eva, joined SSP as the Director of Development, a post she held until she decided to stay home with their growing family, which now includes four daughters. Harry is personally close to many in the charter school movement and was considering starting a charter school when he decided to serve in the Obama Administration instead.

 

His opponent, Tom DiNapoli, was never elected to his position as Comptroller. A longtime Assemblyman, DiNapoli was passed over by a bipartisan commission seeking to fill the vacancy created by the scandal-driven resignation of Alan Hevesi. His colleagues appointed him anyways, at which point then-Governor Spitzer denounced his fellow Democrat as "thoroughly and totally unqualified."

 

DiNapoli engaged in a number of nuisance audits designed to harass charter schools in his early tenure as Comptroller. His attacks were so over the top, that the NY Charter Schools Assoc. sued him and the court agreed, finding that DiNapoli overstepped the bounds of his audit power – the only known example of such a judicial rebuke to a sitting Comptroller.

 

However, with the recent passage of legislation to race the charter school cap in the state, one of the provisions that was snuck in grants the Comptroller this same audit power over charter schools.

 

So New York faces a stark choice this November: elect a person, deemed unqualified on the merits by his own party leadership, who has proven himself to be nothing more than a tool of the teacher unions, or elect a person eminently qualified for the job who will approach it in a nonpartisan, professional manner and who is committed to real education reform.

 

I am proud to support Harry, and I hope you do, too.  Your financial support, either through this event or his website (www.wilsonfornewyork.com) would be greatly appreciated. If you cannot afford the $250 for the event on Wed., please email Erin Crotty at erinacrotty@gmail.com as Harry has agreed to let folks on my email list come to the event for whatever they can afford.