2 impressive choices: Karras focuses his mind on the issues and voters

"Is your daughter adopted? She's so cute she can't be yours," quipped gubernatorial candidate Nolan Karras to a supporter who dropped by the Karras' Salt Lake campaign offices to offer best wishes.

The supporter, who recently wrote out a $15,000 check to the campaign, grins and offers up tacit agreement.

"Yeah," Karras adds, driving home the point, "from the ugly bull comes the cute calf."

That kind of verbal repartee may seem politically dangerous to Karras, who is sorely in need of all the cash he can muster to mount a come-from-behind finish in the June 22 GOP primary. But to those who know Karras, the deadpan sense of humor is simply part of who he is.

"I have used humor all my life," says Karras. "It has saved me a lot of times, and it has defused a lot of situations."

The public rarely gets to see the humorous side of Karras. During a flurry of pre-convention debates, Karras came across as knowledgeable but wooden. He says it was just too hard to offer answers to complex issues in the minute he was given, "and I have never been one for platitudes. So I tried to give thoughtful answers in one minute."

"I admit I was probably a little stiff. It was like I was on display," he said. "I felt like it was a beauty contest."

While Karras said he has tried to "loosen up" during the primary campaign and let his humor shine through, his new ad campaign will be "serious ads about serious things" that he believes are important to Republicans.

It's the serious side of the man who otherwise keeps plastic squirt guns on his desk and finds humor just about everywhere, from his underdog status to Jon Huntsman Jr. ("If I am rich, then he is very, very, very, very rich") to pointing out the peculiarities of his supporters.

During a recent meeting with the head of 1-800-CONTACTS, Karras needled the nation's largest purveyor of contact lenses about why he was wearing eyeglasses. "He said he preferred glasses," Karras said, still marveling at the irony.

Karras' single-minded focus on issues is a strategy targeted at Republicans most likely to vote and those who care passionately about the issues. It was that core who carried him to a surprising second-place finish at the state GOP convention. And because the GOP primary is open to only registered Republicans, he has focused not on the general public but on reaching those he believes will actually decide the outcome.

"I will never beat Jon Huntsman in name ID," Karras said. "He's probably got 100 percent name ID."