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In 1952, three years after the national syndication of Pogo began, Kelly ran Pogo for President against Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. Pogo lost (as you may have noticed), but the popularity of his campaign showed Kelly that the time was ripe to enter a whole new field of comedy.
"It was the sort of period," Kelly wrote, "in which the naive boy cartoonist began to examine the gift horse's feet. He looked to see if they were straw or clay... Crime investigations, a political campaign directed by PR men, real and fancied traitors in government made the believer count all his beans to see if a few had stuck to the pot. I finally came to understand that if I were looking for comic material, I would not ever have to look long. We people manufacture it every day in a hundred ways. The news of the day would be good enough. Perhaps the complexion of the strip changed a little in that direction after 1951. After all, it is pretty hard to walk past an unguarded gold mine and remain emptyhanded."