The Absent Middle Class President

To become President in American politics, one must either come from an over privileged, rich family, or from a family teetering on the almost lowest rung of societal hierarchy. Historically speaking, we have not had a "middle-class" modern president. We either have families like the Kennedy's, the Roosevelt's, or the Bush's, that are super-educated, rich and privileged become presidents and politicians, or we have people that come from rural areas of "small-town America" like Ronald Reagan that rise from the bottom to hold the highest office in the land. In Reagan's case, he came from a rural area of Illinois and was educated at public school and then at Eureka College, as small, not particularly elite school. Juxtapose this with George W. Bush's experience, coming from a political family (his father being president), born in New Haven then lived in Greenwich, being educated at boarding school and then Yale. George Bush comes from the upper-class of society and yet in a way acts as if he came from the rural town of Crawford, Texas. Bush's genius has managed to gain the best of both the upper-class and the lower-class.

Politician's main job while campaigning is to reach out to middle class Americans because thats where the biggest base of voters is located. American complain that the middle class is underrepresented and that the focus of politicians is to cater to the middle class, yet we have yet to see a modern president from such a class. Why is this? Is it because the middle class doesn't generally move up or down in the social hierarchy? Is it because we see middle class Americans as too average? The answer is not obvious. Perhaps the next batch of presidential hopefuls will yield the average, middle class American, that has been absent from these past elections.