Conventional wisdom used to be that if you wanted to become the president of the United States, you'd better be someone regular folks would like to have a beer with. It's not that Americans never voted for upper-class people. After all, wealthy, privileged presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush had won the office. But there was always a certain resonance to the idea that someone who came up from nothing, a regular guy, could rise to the very top in America.
Think of Jimmy Carter, who was raised on a peanut farm, or Harry S. Truman, who had been a (failed) haberdasher in his civilian life. Richard Nixon grew up very poor. We had, after all, explicitly rejected the idea of an aristocracy and built our entire national mythology around the idea that you could make something of yourself no matter what the circumstances of your birth. So we naturally admired those who exemplified that ideal. At least until they disappointed us.
