Because actual experience tends to reveal the limits of candidates’ power, we’re also drawn to heroes with less and less experience, blank slates onto which we can project our fantasies for change. When Mujica was elected president, he wasn’t very tested as a politician. He’d gained fame as a parliamentarian partly for riding to the chambers on a workingman’s scooter. His lack of experience was exactly his appeal—as it was for Obama and de Blasio, as it is for Elizabeth Warren. But the instant the election is over, these same leaders are judged according to different standards. Mujica ran for and won the Uruguayan presidency essentially as a persuasive bar philosopher. But when I asked Graciela Bianchi, a school-reform activist and former Mujica supporter turned critic and opposition parliamentarian, what had led her to turn against him, she sniffed, “He’s a bar philosopher.”

In fact, there is a politician in Uruguay who accomplished some of the kinds of goals people hoped Mujica could tackle. His name is Tabaré Vazquez. An oncologist, he preceded Mujica as president and will succeed him again come March. In 2005, he inaugurated the first left-wing government since the country’s dictatorship and took great strides toward restoring the Uruguayan social safety net, rebooting Batlle’s national health care system, expanding welfare, and making Uruguay the first nation in the world to fully implement the One Laptop Per Child program.

He managed these successes thanks to a political persona as authoritarian and charmless as Mujica’s was gaily anarchic and alluring. With a ruff of silver hair, Basset Hound eyes, and a smile just on the wrong side of lascivious, Vazquez exudes the unsettling aura of a Mr. Rogers impersonator who performs in porn. He rarely consults others on political decisions and projects arrogance in his certitude. Faced with the same constraints all modern presidents face with their power, he just goes around them. When Vazquez decided to ban smoking in public buildings—“something that was really important for him as an oncologist,” Rabuffetti, the journalist, said—he didn’t involve Congress at first. Instead he used Uruguay’s version of an executive order. The unilateral move prompted a flurry of outrage about personal liberties, and the Uruguayan legislature could have subsequently overturned it. But ultimately, the policy established a new status quo that its opponents decided they didn’t want to waste time and political capital to fight.

The Uruguayans I spoke to admired Vazquez’s efficacy—hence the second term they just extended him. But they are not entirely satisfied. His biographer called him “distant and silent.” Two people who’ve worked with Vazquez used the same word when I asked them about him: “Asshole.” He gets things done, but he does not stir the soul.

So is the lesson of Mujica that we should suppress our attraction to charmers and truth-tellers and more rationally choose as our captains tough managers and bloodless wonks? On the third-to-last day of my trip, I went to a place in Uruguay that suggests the answer is not so simple. It was the barrio I drove around in with Rabuffetti, and this time, I didn’t just pass through. Instead, I followed a gravel path off the main road as it turned to dirt, then mud. It led past some of the most derelict houses I’d ever seen, one made of old “for sale” signs. Rheumy-eyed cats padded listlessly through runnels of sewage. At the end of a hopscotch course of puddles sat a little shack owned by a woman named Pilar Almirón.

I’d met Almirón’s 14-year-old son at a struggling public school I’d visited a few days earlier. He and his principal wanted to take me home so his mother could explain Mujica from her neighborhood’s point of view.

“Of course he understands us better,” Almirón said, blinking perplexedly, as if my question itself—whether Mujica had been good for the poor—was not even worth asking. She’d received me in a dark but startlingly pretty anteroom in the shack she’d built, its floorboards mere planks over the slum’s oft-liquid earth. Eagerly, she showed me paintings she’d done on the shack’s walls—stylized fairy images reminiscent of Tinkerbell—and the new wardrobe and table in her bedroom. The wardrobe she’d recently been given through a work-for-housing program sponsored by Mujica’s government. The table she’d subsequently made on her own.

She gave Mujica credit for both interventions: Living in elective poverty himself, he appreciates the importance of something seemingly as simple as a clean place to keep one’s clothes. “Nobody knows how hard you work,” he told a group of poor Uruguayans in September. “Poverty is not in the pocket. It’s in the mind. You can be poor in the pocket but still have your honor.” Mujica’s mission, in such remarks, was to protect the self-worth that even Uruguay’s least well-off have treasured for a century in Uruguay, so easily assaulted by the infiltrating billboards and their message that only those who can afford that new phone or that new car have value at all. “He believes everyone has the right to a home with dignity,” Almirón said.

Once, Mujica had come to visit the neighborhood and seen Almirón’s shack. He’d asked her a question that had stuck with her ever since, affecting how she thought of herself and her five boys and girls: “Does every child of yours have a mattress of his own?” Almirón had never considered this. She works at a slaughterhouse and has barely enough to get by. But, she explained, “Mujica thinks every kid has the right to privacy with his own fantasies.” She had started saving for those beds.

The policymakers and opinion-setters I’d spoken to had been so spittingly certain that Mujica’s presidency had failed Uruguay’s poor. The poor (and four teachers I spoke with who work with them directly) believe the opposite. I spent a couple of days touring lower-income schools and neighborhoods, and the view of Mujica I encountered was as different as the view of a city from street level versus looking down from atop a skyscraper: Everyone, without exception, believed Mujica had improved their lives. Seeing a man who looked like them and lived like them—who even invited them to barbecues at his commune—occupying the land’s highest office had made them feel human again. By noticing them, by speaking to them rather than about them, Mujica had reincarnated them. “We are poor people,” Almirón told me with a note of defiance, “but we are people at the end of the day.”

One of the weightiest responsibilities a president holds is the ability to characterize, by speech and example, his society and the meaning of the lives that are in his charge. We acknowledge this when we feel that it mattered that George W. Bush failed to visit New Orleans for two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. That it mattered when Obama said the seven little words “Trayvon Martin … could have been my son,” just as it mattered that he then failed to speak as powerfully post-Ferguson. One of the activists I invited to dinner in Montevideo was a 60-year-old lesbian community organizer. Even as she complained about Mujica’s sloppy management and policy failures, she added that Uruguayan society did somehow feel different under Mujica’s tenure. She seemed a bit sheepish admitting it: It was unquantifiable. But Mujica’s habit of talking about every person’s fundamental humanity and his willingness to “say absurd things” had made her feel she no longer had to be “politically correct.” Another gay activist piped up that while his avant-garde hairdo might have led him, in the past, to be wary of bicycling along the Rio de la Plata—Uruguayans’ traditional respect for people of different economic stations has not always extended to people with different lifestyles—he now rode freely, and noticed more gay men he knew cycling it, too. “Mujica’s legacy, if it exists,” Caetano, the historian, told me, “is simply empathy.”

There’s something wrong with the way we respond to figures like Mujica. We place our faith in them—fall in love with them—for what they say and the incorporeal impact they have on our national consciousness. But then, not only do we judge their performance on entirely different metrics, we also stop listening to them. Inspirational leaders issue a call to us, not a promise for us. They invite us to see ourselves differently, to open ourselves to a new way of being. If, after casting our ballots, we don’t buy books instead of new cell phones, don’t use less gas, don’t do more to stitch back together the social fabric of our own neighborhoods—if, rather than answer the call, we retreat safely back to our old cynicism—then whose fault is that?

