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Many New Yorkers remember Harrison Goldin as one of three Democrats who smelled blood in the water and ran in the 1989 mayoral primary. As Rudy Giuliani battled Ronald Lauder for the Republican nomination, Goldin, Richard Ravitch and David Dinkins tried to unseat Ed Koch, who was seeking a fourth term.
Dinkins won convincingly, and that ended Goldin’s 24 years in politics, begun with an election in 1965 to the State Senate from Queens.
Goldin is perhaps best known for the 16 years he spent as city comptroller between 1974 and 1989. He won praise for righting the city’s financial ship after the fiscal crisis of the mid-70’s, though also became embroiled in several scandals along the way. In 1985, he was elected to his fourth term as comptroller by a landslide 85 percent, and soon after began seriously laying the groundwork for a mayoral run.
“Obviously life experiences generally contribute to your development and to your maturity. In that way it was meaningful,” he said recently from his office, reflecting on how the politics and policy he dealt with as New York’s longest-serving comptroller influenced his post-political life.
Now, though, he says he is up to something entirely different as the senior managing director of Goldin Associates, a prominent Madison Avenue bankruptcy advisory firm, which specializes in rescuing and restructuring companies that have filed for bankruptcy.
At 70, he is into his 17th year at Goldin Associates, and these days, he is not making headlines for public policy, but for things like the January reports that Refco, Inc. was planning to pay him $685 per hour as its new CEO.
Goldin said that while his time as comptroller was influential in his new career, “it had no direct relevance to what I do.”
In all, Goldin said that he had left office still positive about the political process.
“I can say now without fear of contradiction that I was as idealistic and as motivated by trying to do what was right for the public the day I left as I was the day I first entered public office,” he said, noting that nearly two decades later, he was not missing public life.
“When you’re not in public office, you have a very different perspective than you do when you hold elected office,” he said.
“When you’re in elected office, that’s all that you focus on and it’s all-consuming for you,” he added. “I obviously follow public affairs with great interest and concern as a citizen, but by definition I’m not involved in the great issues of the day the way I was once.”
Nor had he ever thought of re-entering the political arena after the ’89 primary, he said.
“When it was over, it was over,” he said.