Bill Clinton had a Yale Law Degree and a distinction as a Fulbright Scholar when he ran for President of the United States in 1992.
He won in part on the perception that he was a down-home country boy.
In the 2008 presidential election, the half-White Barack Obama is running for presidency with a mere Harvard Law Degree.
Even so, he is seen as an "elitist" who was described by the conservative Republican Representative Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia as "uppity.
" Of course that comment can be put in context.
Lynn Westmoreland became known for his campaign to get the Ten Commandments installed in the House and Senate Chambers.
Asked to name them in 2006, he was able to name only three.
News sources agree that the term is racially charged.
But if the comment was not racially-based, alternative possible reasons for the perception that Barack Obama is elitist while Bill Clinton is not are at the very least entertaining.
Geographic location and global savvy may make the typical American voter wary of Barack Obama, who knows his way around the world and comes across convincingly as comfortable with foreigners.
But Bill Clinton was no global neophyte after his stint in London.
And he certainly got along, and still does, with foreigners.
But he was from Hope, Arkansas, a small town in one of the poorest states of the country.
Barack Obama grew up all over and came to prominence in the mighty American Midwest big city of Chicago.
However, if Americans at large mistrust big cities, then they must either get over the resistance to learning more about big city American neighbors or continue to see their country on a downslide in a globalizing world.
Regardless of yearning for some good old days of simpler ways that never were, American jobs and economic growth in the future depend on dealing with a very big and complex world.
Moving on, it is possible that American perceptions of Barack Obama as elitist are not based on either presumptions about aspirations appropriate for members of various racial groups or on the values attained in large or small towns.
In that case, perhaps the perception comes from the fact that Barack Obama is so high above the low bar that presently exists for powerful men in government, whether American or foreign.
By all appearances across the media scrutiny that is not always evenly applied to politicians' personal lives, Barack Obama appears to have been researched and found to be a happily married family man devoted to his family.
Given his background and his achievements from beginnings that seemed not particularly well starred, except by the hallmark democratic American standard of affording the utmost opportunity for advancement to anyone capable and willing to benefit from advantages to be found, the argument can be made that he's been too busy making a productive life, that he hasn't had the time or luxury to indulge the good-old-boys sport of inflating the ego by prowling around.
If at least part of the perception of Barack Obama as an elitist comes from the fact that he's a happy, well-adjusted, well-grounded and satisfied man, then the identification of that root problem in modern society, at both the domestic and international levels, would indeed represent a revolution.
Cracking the glass ceiling of men needing to be unhappy at home so as to rise up in the world would be a mighty stroke, bigger than the ones that have cracked the ceilings already in the 2008 American election.
Such a revolutionary statement could break through some enormous logjams to America's growth at home and abroad.
It would make for real change, one Americans could bank on.