Americans by and large don’t resent success, or the successful. This is the country, after all, that invented the notion of the “self-made man,” and which sent countless Horatio Alger novels about upwardly mobile match-boys to the top of the bestseller lists in their day. We just prefer our million- and billionaires to have a little dirt under their fingernails, because true rags-to-riches stories remind us that upward mobility is still possible (and maybe even for us, too).

We’re less likely to lionize those who start the race with big advantages. In Caddyshack, we root for nouveau riche Rodney Dangerfield, not old-money stuffed-shirt Ted Knight. In The Social Network we root for the prickly outsider Mark Zuckerberg, not his one-time rivals the Winklevoss twins. Mitt Romney’s problem isn’t that he’s rich; it’s that, to a lot of Americans, he’s the wrong kind of rich. He’s Winklevoss rich.

That may be why Romney has been peppering his campaign speeches with references to his grandfather, a man whose life was far less financially comfortable than his famous grandson’s has been.