Months after clearing the Democratic race for governor of any serious opponents, Attorney General Jerry Brown held his first official public campaign event Monday - slamming Republican gubernatorial rivals Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner as "the apostles of darkness and ignorance" and calling their expensive barrage of mudslinging "intellectually embarrassing" to California voters.

"They are so banal," Democrat Brown told about 200 students and others at a rally at UC Santa Barbara, referring to the millions of dollars that Whitman, the former eBay CEO, and Poizner, the state insurance commissioner, have spent on attack ads in a primary battle that some polls suggest is a dead heat with three weeks until the June 8 election.

"If you know how to write and think," Brown said, "look at those ads, and do the exact opposite." He added: "The apostles of darkness and ignorance are well-heeled, and they have great political consultants."

Brown told the students, who like students at other UC campuses are feeling the strain of a 32 percent hike in tuition between last fall and this fall, that the GOP candidates' expensive campaigns raise the question: "What could we have done with $100 million on this campus?"

No notes, no entourage

Monday's event, where Brown spoke without notes and was not accompanied by an entourage, underscored the contrasts between his low-key campaign and the big-spending efforts of the two GOP candidates. Whitman has put $64 million of her own money into her campaign to date, while Poizner has spent $21 million from his own fortune. Brown has spent less than $1 million.

Brown's star appearance at Monday's rally marked a day of campaign outreach to Obama-generation voters in Southern California, where he was scheduled to attend a high-profile fundraiser in Los Angeles - one of three there in two days - for Generation for Change, a politically active group of young professionals.

The former two-term governor, three-time presidential candidate and mayor of Oakland lambasted the tuition hikes as a short-sighted mistake, saying "we've got to fight fee increases," calling them "a mortgage on your future."

Brown also called for protecting the coast against offshore oil drilling, saying the potential environmental damage was not worth the estimated $100 million in annual revenue that could be reaped.

He told students he would not sugarcoat the state's $20 billion budget deficit. "This thing took years to screw up, and I'm not going to unscrew it overnight."

Regarding the furloughs of state workers, who enjoy the support of powerful labor unions, Brown said: "I'm not going to give you pie in the sky; there's no particular money tree here." But he added that "those with the biggest belts" should tighten them.

Avoided a primary

Brown sidestepped a Democratic primary battle after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom dropped from the race in October, but he has also escaped the attention of young voters who weren't born when he began the first of two terms as California's governor in 1975.

"Jerry Brown? I don't know anything about him," said Nathan Koveie, 19, a pre-biology major at UC Santa Barbara who said he is among the 20 percent of state voters who has registered "decline to state" for the coming election.

Koveie, a Los Angeles resident, said he is well aware of Whitman and Poizner - who are on air in Southern California in a virtual nonstop barrage - and was leaning toward voting Republican in the coming primary.

"I want us to get out of our deficit," he said. "It's getting more and more expensive to go here, and a lot of my friends had to go back to community college because they couldn't afford it."

Older voters also showed up at the rally, including campground manager Joanne McGarry, 53, an independent voter who remembered Brown's first administration.

"I'm not just waxing nostalgic. I'm hoping for the future," she said, adding that she was turned off by the expensive efforts on the GOP side. "I don't like how money talks. I like to be influenced by ideas, not dollars and cents."

Republicans complain that attacks by union-backed groups supporting Brown's campaign have gone virtually unchallenged.

Mike Murphy, Whitman's chief strategist, said Brown's campaign is "devoid of any issue messages" because the Democrat doesn't want to risk alienating his union followers on issues such as pension reform.

But Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin said Brown's strategy to conserve his funding for the general election battle is smart.

"He's watching the Republicans beating each other up," Tulchin said. "What's that old saying? 'Don't get into the middle of a murder-suicide.' "

Some young Democrats say Brown, 72, who would be the nation's oldest governor if elected to a third term, could come off as a fresh face after the torrent of ads in the GOP primary season.

"I don't even watch television - and my television turns on by itself sometimes, and there's Meg Whitman," joked Eli Dansky, an organizer of the Generation for Change event at the W Hotel in Hollywood.

Harroon Salleem, a co-founder of the group, said Brown has showed he can "engage this younger demographic that is aware of him, and is still frustrated by some of the repercussions of the economic state of California."