Humor and truth on the campaign trail

 

In 2016, Georgia artist Pilliard Dickle became known as the last person in America to know who won the presidential election. Now he’s now running for the job himsef. But he’s doing it his way. He’s conducting his campaign from his futon. In his bathrobe. On $175. 

 

“I think a broke cartoonist might just be what Americas needs,” he says. “And I vow to be as broke the day I walk out of the Oval Office as the day I’m elected.” 

 

His campaign slogan is “Let’s put America back together again.” It’s a positive, upbeat campaign that sees a bright future. And it’s the most colorful of any in American history. He’s is not running as red or blue, or even green. He’s with The Periwinkle Party—the party named after a crayon. “It’s mostly blue with a dollop of red,” he says. (But he’s quick to point out, it’s “Eisenhower red.”) 

 

“You don’t have to quit your party to become a Periwinklillian,” says Pilliard Dickle. “It’s a little add-on party, a temporary alliance of people across two-thirds of the political spectrum, from your Blues on the left to your Purples in the middle who are ready to stand together, pick up the pieces of this nation and put it back together. Not like it was…better than it was.” 

 

The idea for Pilliard Dickle to run for President was the brainstorm of a 12 year old boy in West Virginia. Calvin Green might just be the youngest campaign manager in the nation. “Sooner or later, something as bizarre as what has happened will happen,” he says. “But this time something good. And this just might be it!”

 

Although peppered with generous helpings of whimsicality, the campaign offers substantive solutions to real issues. For example, Dickle, who holds a degree in economics, has an innovative tax plan for mega-corporations that snaps loopholes shut in one fell swoop. He says it’s “so simple a fourth-grader could do the taxes for Netflix. And it won’t come out zero!” 

 

Does he really think he can win? Pilliard Dickle is realistic about his chances: “I’m just a mild-mannered cartoonist with nothing to lose by telling the truth. And the truth is, it might be a tad difficult to capture the Oval Office on $175. But I’m not running on money, I’m running on imagination.”

 

Knowing he’s not going to win, he says, does not necessarily mean he’s not going to win. “In today’s world, something can come up from the grass roots that’s not dependent on a bunch of slick TV ads and a Koch brothers super pac and capture the imagination of America. That might seem unlikely—but is it any more unlikely than this absurd reality we’re living in?”  

 

“All we’re asking voters to do is go insane,” says his campaign manager, “They did it once, two years ago. We’re saying ‘Go insane again, America, but this time 180º in the opposite direction.’”