Native of Romania to Run for Governor : Candidacy: Genovica Niculescu-Baldeanu boldly demanded in 1977 that she be allowed to move to the U.S. With the same boldness, she hopes to make a difference in government here.

When Genovica Niculescu-Baldeanu got fed up with her native Romania in 1977, she told the government so and demanded freedom.

Within three months, the Romanian government, then under the repressive leadership of Nicolae Ceausescu, allowed her to leave the country.

Three years later her family followed.

It was a miracle.

For most of her life, Niculescu-Baldeanu (pronounced: Nee-koo- les -koo Ball- dan -uh) has had a knack for miracles. Another one could come in handy for the 59-year-old immigrant, who has become the latest contender for governor.

“Now we’ll see if miracles happen,” Niculescu-Baldeanu said recently while announcing her candidacy for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

Her grass-roots campaign plan, she said, will appeal to people who ordinarily don’t vote--those who, like her, have had enough of political icons without political substance.

Niculescu-Baldeanu, a resident of Irvine since 1988, is a mechanical engineer, a mother of two sons and a self-described political savior.

She knows she’s a long shot to win her party’s nomination in the June 5 primary.

“Right now, I don’t think the Republican leadership wants me,” she said. “But I will talk to them, and after I tell them how I will save them, they will want me. I’m going to organize the state like a good, honest business, not like a political institution.”

Niculescu-Baldeanu contends career politicians and bureaucrats have proven they are incapable of fixing the state’s economic and educational problems. They have done little or nothing, she said.

“My campaign will be a crusade to get the good, intelligent, wise people to take the place of the politicians who are dumb or are acting in bad faith,” she said.

Reagonomics draws a good deal of Niculescu-Baldeanu’s wrath. She said the former president’s plan concentrated more wealth and power in fewer hands, and she described Reagan as “the Ceausescu of America.”

But what qualifies her to run government?

“I know how to organize,” she said.

Before leaving Romania in 1977, she rose from field mechanical engineer to researcher and then to manager of about 5,000 workers with the country’s hydroelectric power complex, she said.

From this high-level post, she criticized the Ceausescu government, she said.

She said she believed then that the dictator was tapping the nation’s wealth--as was later proved after he was deposed and executed along with his wife last year.

Niculescu-Baldeanu said she demanded to be allowed to leave Romania. For three months, she interviewed with Ceausescu’s secret police, the Securitate, before being allowed to board a plane for New York.

She worked for a while as a taxicab driver in New York. In 1980, her husband, Radu, and her two sons, Radu and Dan, were released from Romania with the help of then-Sen. Henry Jackson (R-Washington).

Niculescu-Baldeanu and her husband were later hired by a nuclear power engineering company in Northern California.

Niculescu-Baldeanu moved to Irvine in 1988, when both her sons enrolled at UC Irvine. Her husband will retire in a year and join her, she said.

Meanwhile, she has entered the political arena.

Her solution to the state’s problems, she said, is to take the best of socialism and capitalism and transform the California economy into a highly competitive yet cooperative force similar to Japan’s economy.

Niculescu-Baldeanu said she is also concerned about education. She ran for an Irvine Unified School District Board of Trustees seat in the summer of 1988, soon after becoming a citizen, but stopped campaigning after she realized she could only implement her big plans on a higher level, she said.

How would Niculescu-Baldeanu change education?

Go back to the basics and teach children to be a moral part of society, she said.

If becoming governor is highly unlikely, well, Niculescu-Baldeanu has beaten the odds before. She could have been killed by the Romanian secret police; her family could have been executed; she could have starved in America.

“I came to America because I thought I could change the world much better here,” she said. “Nobody who is an immigrant or who was born here knows how to solve all the problems. I do.”