Not even a children’s book author can include more animals in a sentence than U.S. Senate candidate Gary Swing.

“I’ve always said this is a nation of sheep ruled by wolves for the benefit of pigs, and I would like to be a voice to represent the interests of frogs and other endangered species,” Swing said in a recent interview with The Colorado Statesman.

Yes, he did mean to say frogs.

Frogs are a pretty big deal to Swing. In fact, he showed up to his interview at the state Capitol wearing a smile, a “Save the Frogs!” T-shirt and pajamas honoring Dig ‘Em Frog, the legendary mascot of the sugar-drenched cereal Honey Smacks.

Ernie Banks was Mr. Cub. Gary Swing is Mr. Frog. And he’s running for the Senate against Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet as a member of the Boiling Frog Party — a satirical effort to use political theater to bring attention to serious issues.

Swing’s party is named after a couple of frog metaphors. One story goes that if a frog is dropped in boiling hot water, it will jump out to save itself. But a frog sitting in cold water that gradually reaches a boiling point will just sit there and do nothing until it is boiled to death.

“It’s not a true story, but it’s a well known metaphor,” Swing said. “Things get worse and worse. But people don’t protest. They don’t rise up. They don’t rebel. They don’t do what is necessary to save themselves from destruction.”

Swing said apathy about politics has made bad problems worse, such as the deterioration of civil liberties, human overpopulation and climate change, which he called “the biggest issue facing us today.”

When he’s not running for office, Swing does promotional work for performing arts events and often takes several months of the year off for long-distance backpacking trips. He is a young-looking 47-year-old who “stopped aging in 1993 at the age of 25.”

While he may look young, the frog-loving Swing is not green to political campaigns.

Swing first ran for political office as a Green Party candidate against Penfield Tate in a 1996 House District 8 race. Since then, he’s ran several other quixotic campaigns, including a Senate run in 1998 as a member of the Pacifist Party. He even ran a satirical campaign to become president of Arizona four years ago.

“My motivation for that was my mother” — she lives in Tuscon — “said to me, ‘Why don’t you run for something in Arizona so I can vote for you?’” Swing said.

Swing garnered about 8.5 percent of the vote in his 1996 bid against Tate. But his other Green Party candidacies have proven what Kermit the Frog has long said — It ain’t easy being green.

Swing captured just 2 percent of the vote in his 2014 bid to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman. (Swing said he ran against Coffman after seeing the 6th Congressional District described as the “swingiest of swing seats” and decided it was a great place to find “Swing voters.”) He collected just a little over 1 percent of the vote in a 2012 race against Democratic U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette.

So Swing has ditched the Green Party for his Senate run and he hopes voters hop on board his Boiling Frog Party bid.

“I’ve gotten more of a positive response to it than I would have expected,” he said of his candidacy. “I think people really connect with the idea. They like the humor. They like the symbolism.”

If elected, Swing wants to create a single-payer, universal health care system, fully legalize marijuana, support international agreements that dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and end all corporate bailouts.

Swing also wants to abolish presidential elections, which he calls “meaningless shams,” and instead create a parliamentary system by which Congress selects our chief executive.

Speaking of Congress, Swing wants to abolish the Senate, which would put him out of a job if he’s elected.

“The Senate has given small, rural conservative states disproportionate representation to the extreme,” he said. “Of the current members of the U.S. Senate, the Democratic caucus, which includes two independents, had 20 million more votes than the senators from the Republican Party [in the last election], and yet the Republicans are the majority in the Senate.”

While it’s a common complaint about the Senate, these are bold ideas. But Swing might as well swing for the fences, seeing as how he knows he’s not going to win anyway.

“I know I have no chance of being elected, obviously,” he said. “But that’s part of the farcical nature of it. I think the entire political system is a joke. There’s serious issues, but I don’t take the political system very seriously. It’s a rigged game.”

“I see the Republican Party as being completely out of touch with reality,” he added. “The Democratic Party is completely corrupt. They don’t sound as outright insane as Republicans do, but they still represent the same corporate interests.”

Swing said he will hold a press conference in Boulder next spring to announce a petition drive to get on the November 2016 ballot. He will make the announcement while sitting in a hot tub on April 30 — national Save the Frogs Day.

It remains to be seen whether Swing will be able to line up key endorsements from the likes of Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows or from administrators at Texas Christian University, home of the Horned Frogs.

In the meantime, Swing is focusing on an Internet-based voter outreach effort — and giving away the best campaign swag ever. Swing likes to hand out endangered species condoms, which he said draw “the connection between human overpopulation and the destruction of the habitat and the mass extinction of animal species.”

After all …

“What would be a Swing campaign without Swing campaign condoms?” he said.

— Twitter: @VicVela1