On last night’s episode of Mad Men, Henry Francis, a high-ranking operative for Republican New York mayor John Lindsay and Betty’s mostly supportive, Bugle-blind second husband, took a phone call at his home in which he told his interlocutor, “Romney’s a clown and I don't want him standing next to him.” Francis was referring to George Romney, Michigan governor (1963–1969) and father of current presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Romney, a Republican with relatively progressive views on civil rights, became something of a political pariah following his public opposition to G.O.P. presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964. That might explain the “clown” comment.

We know Francis meant the Romney the elder because in the summer of 1966—the year Season FiveMad Men takes place—Romney the younger was on a Mormon mission in France and would not have had an opportunity to be photographed with John Lindsay. (According to a decidedly judgmental Wikipedia article, “Like most individual Mormon missionaries, he did not gain many converts, with the nominally Catholic but secular, wine-loving French people proving especially resistant to a religion that prohibits alcohol.”) So what were the other presidential candidates doing in 1966?

Ron Paul, despite our initial guess that he’d have already served several terms in congress and mounted four to six unsuccessful presidential runs, had not yet entered the House of Representatives. In 1966, he was a surgeon in the Air National Guard.

Rick Santorum was eight and therefore likely held policy positions whose nuance rivals that of his current platform.

Newt Gingrich, recent Emory graduate, was still on his first wife! He had not yet divorced her, married his mistress, and then divorced her, and married his later mistress.

Barack Obama was, naturally, the leader of a virulent anti-American band of Marxist radicals with factions in Kenya and Bill Ayers’s home library.