A very true statement

Emphasis added. [Link]

My more serious version goes something like this: the trick to the presidency is understanding that while Americans want a president they can look up to, they do not want to feel that the president is looking back down on them. In other words, we like to put our presidents up on a pedestal, but then wish to gaze upon them at eye level. This befits a democratic republic, but is hard to pull off. The presidents who can pull this off--FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush--tend to get elected and re-elected. Presidential candidates who come off as "better-than-you" elitists usually don't win or get re-elected. Dukakis was rightly called an "eat your vegetables" candidate, and Mark Steyn's apt comment that Gore was the first person to win the popular vote without being popular raises the point that Gore should have won the 2000 election handily. (And do we even need to bother explaining John Kerry?) I think you can run this filter all the way back to Eisenhower versus Stevenson.

Some of you should be asking, "What about Obama? If he's not an elitist looking down on the American people, then no one is." I think Obama's ability to overcome his elitist bearing can be attributed to the exotic factor of his mixed race and the "hope and change" phenomenon of 2008. Any white liberal who had made the "bitter clingers" remark, and carried himself with Obama's haughtiness, would have been a goner. But I think it is possible that the hope and change magic will have completely worn off by next year, and if you like the theory, as I do, that when voters are unhappy with the incumbent president, as we were in 2008 with George W. Bush, they like to choose not simply the other party but the person who is most opposite in temperament. In that kind of dynamic Pawlenty might match up very well with Obama.