Meg Whitman shifts her focus to Jerry Brown

A day after squaring off with her Republican rival, Meg Whitman focused her front-running campaign for governor on the likely Democratic nominee, Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown.

In a campaign stop at the Leisure World retirement community in Seal Beach, Whitman all but ignored Steve Poizner, the state insurance commissioner, whom she debated the night before.

Whitman’s aides played an edited video of Brown’s campaign announcement this month, using it as a prop for her to call him a hypocrite for promising an end to platitudes but failing to unveil specific proposals yet.

“We’ve had nothing but platitudes and no real definition of a plan that he wants to put together for Californians,” Whitman said.

In response, Brown spokesman Sterling Clifford took a swipe at Whitman’s poor voting record.

“Ms. Whitman has so little experience voting that she might not know this, but she needs to win the Republican primary before she faces the Democratic nominee in the general election,” Clifford said.

Whitman said later that she was not taking Poizner for granted. She needs to wage a two-front campaign, she said, because Brown is without major opposition in the June 8 primary.

But in her speech to hundreds of seniors, she did not mention Poizner, who has advertised far less on television than she has and lags far behind her in polls. She was asked about him by an audience member in the third-to-last question of the afternoon and repeated her past accusations that he’d “flipped” his positions to become more conservative on taxes and abortion since a failed run for the state Assembly in 2004.

“The issue with Steve is around trust,” she said. “What does he really stand for? Voters don’t like it when you change your position depending on the office that you’re running for.”

Poizner did not hold campaign events Tuesday but sent a memo to reporters from his policy director, Lanhee J. Chen, titled, “Key Policy Differences Exposed in Debate.”

“Their fundamental differences were most apparent on two issues of substantial importance to Republican primary voters -- taxes and illegal immigration,” the memo said.

Poizner is advocating a broad-based tax cut, while Whitman favors targeted tax cuts. He would like to completely end benefits for undocumented immigrants, while she does not approve of government refusing to provide their children with a public school education.

Whitman, the former head of EBay, spoke at the community in Clubhouse No. 4, a civic center decorated in peach and purple. She drew big applause when she talked about cutting the state workforce and said she would veto virtually any bill that did not relate to her priorities of improving public education, cutting government spending and creating jobs.

She also unveiled a 48-page color campaign booklet to describe her policy agenda. With photos of Whitman across the state, scenery from California and statistics, it compiled many of the ideas she has been promoting for months.

It touched on a few fresh areas, such as making the state lottery run more like a business, creating a grand jury-style system like Florida’s to root out government fraud and consolidating the three state agencies that collect taxes.

Whitman also told the seniors she would like to include 100 people from the private sector among her 300 top appointees.

michael.rothfeld@latimes.com