CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : GOP Challenger Unz Plans Media Blitz This Week

Capping a months-long “stealth campaign” intended to take Gov. Pete Wilson by surprise, a 32-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur plans this week to launch a $1-million, statewide media blitz to introduce California voters to what his literature calls “the Republican candidate for governor.”

Ron K. Unz, a Harvard-trained physicist who owns a financial software company in Palo Alto, said Monday that he is spending his own money to “jump-start” his campaign to wrest the Republican gubernatorial nomination from the governor. And the first-time candidate said he is prepared to spend a lot more.

“We’re talking about a good deal more than $1 million and less than $35 million,” said Unz (rhymes with nuns ), who said his first paid advertisements will begin appearing in newspapers and on radio later this week, with television spots beginning next week. “I feel very strongly that Pete Wilson is bad for California. . . . In many ways, he’s much more of a Democrat than a Republican.”

Dan Schnur, Wilson’s campaign spokesman, said that the governor is unworried by Unz’s candidacy and that there are no plans to alter Wilson’s pre-primary strategy.

“In each of our past elections we’ve run ads in the primary and in all likelihood we’ll do it again this time. This isn’t going to affect either how much or what kind of advertising we do,” Schnur said, noting that Wilson easily defeated his primary opposition in the 1990 race.

The fledgling candidate, who has been whispered about in Republican circles for weeks, already is appealing to some conservatives. Insiders say he has a good chance of being endorsed by the California Republican Assembly, the state’s largest conservative grass-roots organization, which meets this weekend in Sacramento.

“I would think the CRA would look very favorably on Mr. Unz,” said Stephen R. Frank, a former CRA president who now chairs the

CRA fact-finding committee that recommends candidates for endorsement. Frank called Unz’s effort the “Unzeat Pete Campaign.”

“He understands you can’t tax your way into prosperity and that government, like business, needs to keep a tight budget. He’s an economic conservative,” Frank said. “. . . We cannot afford to have somebody other than that as governor.”

The CRA has long been at odds with Wilson--at one CRA meeting, for example, the governor was burned in effigy. Some Republican observers said they suspect that Unz’s candidacy, instead of being home-grown, was in fact masterminded by former Republican Party officials with a grudge against the governor.

Lorelei Kinder, Unz’s campaign director, confirmed Monday that she was once the executive director of the state Republican Party and that John Kurzweil, Unz’s press secretary, was the party’s communications director from mid-1988 to mid-1990. She also confirmed that she is at odds with many of the governor’s policies. But she denied that her work for Unz is motivated by revenge and seconded Unz’s claim that running for governor was his own idea.

“I have never waged vendettas, and I never will,” she said, adding that she believes Unz is a strong candidate. “We’ll jump-start (this campaign) and the motor will keep running. I don’t think that . . . any of our team would be involved unless we felt there was an opportunity to go all the way.”

Schnur discounted the importance of the CRA endorsement. “The most important thing is that the party comes together behind the eventual nominee.”

A Los Angeles Times poll conducted last month found that Wilson has a 57% positive job rating among registered Republicans statewide, while 34% disapproved of him. When paired against either of the leading Democratic candidates, Kathleen Brown or John Garamendi, Wilson retained 72% of the Republican vote.

Unz, who achieved minor celebrity as a San Fernando Valley teen-ager when he was named one of the 100 top math students in the nation, said he decided to run for governor because he feels Wilson has abandoned the founding principles of the Republican Party.

A self-described Ronald Reagan Republican, Unz said his platform boils down to five basic points: smaller government, lower taxes, fewer regulations, quality education and traditional moral values. He opposes state funding for abortion, he supports the death penalty and he promises that, if elected, he will draw a salary of just one dollar a year.

Unz’s dissatisfaction with Wilson is largely economic, he said.

“The first thing he did in coming to office was to push through the largest state tax increase in American history,” said the soft-spoken candidate, who said his experience running a high-technology company prepared him well for tackling the state’s budget problems.

One way he proposes to do that is described in a brochure that his campaign is printing this week. In it, Unz laments that state government “has ignored the computer revolution.”

Promising several “massive” cuts in government, Unz said he will replace bureaucrats with computers (“one cheap computer can do the work of 10 paper-shuffling bureaucrats”). He also wants to bring the same technology to California’s public schools, he said.

“To learn the basic technologies necessary for their future jobs, our children need computers, not condoms,” Unz’s brochure says.

Profile: Ron K. Unz

* Born: Sept. 20, 1961

* Residence: Palo Alto

* Education: Bachelor’s degrees in physics and history, Harvard University. Phi Beta Kappa.

* Career highlights: In the late 1980s, Unz took a leave of absence from Stanford University, where he was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in theoretical physics. He worked as an associate at a New York City mortgage finance company. In 1988, he founded Wall Street Analytics Inc., a financial services software company.

* Interests: As a student at North Hollywood High School, Unz qualified as one of the 100 top math students in the United States, and he has an abiding interest in math and science. Unz was the third Californian in history to win the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. As a graduate student, he did physics research with Stephen Hawking.

* Family: Single

* Quote: “Our children need computers, not condoms.”