The Sages Should Have Looked in the Mirror. Rabbis Should Too.

Pesahim 49b describes how much the Sages and amei ha'aretz hated each other. I will give the Sages the benefit of the doubt and attribute their hatred of amei ha'aretz to being a response to the hatred of the amei ha'aretz to the Sages. But there is no indication in Pesahim 49b of why the amei ha'aretz hated the Sages so much.

For that we need to turn to the most famous am ha'aretz, Jesus of Nazareth.

Matthew 23

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: 2 “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. 3 So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. 4 They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
5 “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries[a]wide and the tassels on their garments long; 6 they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; 7 they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.

For the rest of Jesus' rant against the Pharisees, see the rest of Matthew 23. Whether Jesus was right is irrelevant. The important thing is that he is describing the Sages' popular image. The Sages should have worried mire about the extent to which they were responsible for that image and what they could do about it.

Note that Jesus isn't saying not to obey the Sages. He starts out explicitly saying that the Sages are the only authorities on Halacha. He is saying that you can follow the letter of the law while perverting the spirit of the law, 1200 years before RaMBaN invented the concept of "naval birshoot hatorah".

To a certain extent, Jesus' description of the Sages applies also to modern Rabbis, as documented by Failed Messiah http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/ inter alia.