Presidents come in two kinds. Some are self-made; they resemble Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, who “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” Such are Lincoln, who came from almost nothing, and Reagan, who came from very little: like Gatsby, they invented their own conceptions of themselves.

Other presidents are shaped by family tradition, a hereditary ideal: They have been bred to public service in the way the Roosevelts and the Bushes were. The tradition-driven man is conscious always of the legacy of his ancestors. The self-made man says, with Napoleon, “Je suis un ancêtre.” “I am an ancestor.”

The 2008 election promises to be the first presidential contest since 1992 (when the elder Bush lost to Clinton) to pit a tradition-bred man (McCain, the scion of a naval family) against a self-created one (Obama). The 1996 election was a contest between two self-made men, Clinton and Dole; 2000 and 2004 were patrician duels — Bush v. Gore, Bush v. Kerry. (Were Hillary to get the nomination, the tradition-driven McCain would face, not a self-made candidate, but one from the widow-orphan class of female leaders.)

Who, in the McCain-Obama match-up, has the advantage?

Given America’s democratic antipathy to hereditary privilege, the self-made candidate ought to have an immense advantage, at the polls, over his high-bred rivals. He is the embodiment of the dream Lincoln sketched in 1864. “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House,” he told the 166th Ohio Regiment. “I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has.”

Do the math, however, and the self-made man’s advantage evaporates. A division of the presidents elected since 1900 into two categories, self-made and tradition-driven, yields:

Self-made: McKinley, Harding, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton . . . . (8)

Tradition-driven: Theodore Roosevelt (a product of old New York), Taft (his father, Aphonso, was a Cincinnati luminary and Grant’s Secretary of War), Coolidge (old Massachusetts), Franklin D. Roosevelt (old New York), Kennedy (heir not just to Joe’s dough but also to the Fitzgerald political tradition and, by adoption, to the Harvard-Choate tradition of public service), George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush . . . . (7).

Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, and Carter present a difficulty. A case can be made for their inclusion in the tradition-driven category. Each exhibited a pride of birth tinged with the old Southern ideal of gentility. Wilson, the son a Presbyterian minister, assimilated the Calvinist concept of election to the southern tradition of aristocratic leadership: He thought himself born to rule. Johnson was scornful of journalists who called him a plebeian foil to Kennedy; his ancestors, though they were not rich, were, he said, civic leaders, not cowboys. Carter descends from the minor gentry of Georgia. Yet though the southern presidents possessed deeply felt traditions, they had none of the advantages of the northern elites; they had to make their own way in the world, much as self-made men do.

Splitting the southern difference, then, I find 9.5 of the post-1900 presidents to have been self-made, 8.5 to have been the products of a notable family tradition. The closeness of the tally suggests that, although Americans revere self-made men, they do not reject their tradition-driven rivals. They know that men with strong hereditary traditions behind them have their own, often valuable contributions to make to a healthy polity.

The Founders are a case in point: They were most of them schooled from childhood to regard public service as an obligation. Hence the disproportionate predominance, in the early republic, of Virginia dynasts and New England patriarchs. There were exceptions — immigrants like Hamilton and James Wilson, self-invented men like Franklin. But it was only with Andrew Jackson that a novus homo took possession of the White House.

Obama knows the value of the self-made brand. His two books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, are exercises in self-invention: in them he takes bits and pieces of his heritage and stitches them together to form a new whole.

McCain, for his part, knows the value of his traditions. His fealty to his warrior heritage, he argues, makes him preeminently qualified to defend American interests in a dangerous world. He lived up to the oath he took when he became an officer, the oath his father and grandfather took before him — to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” That he lived up to the oath matters to him. It will matter to voters, too.

But can McCain’s traditions trump Obama’s audacious act of self-creation? I think they can. Americans like to root for self-made men, but they are wary of Jack Cades, men whose rise is fueled by bitterness and resentment. This was the self-made Nixon’s problem: His making was really a piecing together of his resentments. The contrast with Reagan is instructive. Unlike Nixon (Whittier ’34), Reagan (Eureka ’32) never complained that that the deck was stacked in favor of Harvard and Yale men.

Obama has worked hard to show that he does not harbor the resentments that tormented Nixon, but two of those closest to him — his wife and his pastor — are filled with a bitterness he regards sympathetically.

Thus the contradiction at the heart of Obama’s message. His song of his autogenic self is at odds with the politics of resentment he promotes, a politics that implicitly rejects the possibility, for most people, of self-made success. When he looks at ordinary Americans, Obama sees, not millions of people seizing opportunities to improve their lives, but millions stewing in their own grievances, lamenting the unfairness of a system that puts success out of reach. (“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter,” he said in San Francisco.)

He can’t have it both ways. Does he believe, with Lincoln and Reagan, that Americans, regardless of their background, have the power to make themselves into successes — or does he think, with Michelle and Rev. Wright, that success must instead be created for them by the government?

McCain, in the meantime, has shrewdly embraced his traditionalist background. The question a tradition-driven candidate must answer is whether he can hold his own in situations where daddy can’t help him. McCain’s military traditions speak for themselves. No presidential contender in memory has passed through such a crucible as he endured. His traditions, so far from making life easier for him, made it inconceivably harder. In the one instance where his family connections could have secured him an advantage — early release from a Communist torture chamber — he refused to avail himself of them.

The tradition-driven candidate must also show that he is not the tool of the privileged classes that produced him. (Hence F.D.R.’s pose as a traitor to his class.) Here, too, McCain gets a pass. The military might once have been a pillar of the privileged establishment; but since the 1960s, few professions have appeared less fashionable — more uncool — in the eyes of the country’s elites than the officer corps. Those who aspire to enter the circle of privilege do not go to West Point or Annapolis: they go to an Ivy League business or law school.

In this year’s contest between the self-made and the tradition-driven man, the traditionalist has the advantage.

– Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.