Character is fate. This is true for nations as it is for individuals. Only when we understand both Obama’s character and America’s will we able to fathom the tragedy — the loss, the unfulfilled promise, the disappointment — that attends his Presidency.

Who is Barack Obama? One telling moment can be found in his description of his mother’s death in The Audacity of Hope. Obama writes: “More than once I saw fear flash across her eyes. More than fear of pain or fear of the unknown, it was the sheer loneliness of death that frightened her, I think.” Obama’s mother was an anthropologist. She viewed all cultures from a distance, and did not have a commitment to any particular one. In his own childhood, Obama rediscovered his mother’s isolation. He resolved that he would not live without contact, without commitment, without something to fill the void, the emptiness. He joined the black church. He became a community organizer. He married and had children. All of this led to his famous words at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

Obama’s ability to articulate a common identity for the United States won him the nomination. Unlike John Edwards, Obama saw the US in terms of what Rousseau called “the social compact,” as opposed to an aggregation of interests. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he tried to bring people together, not to split them apart. His opposition to the war in Iraq was at the core of his extraordinary victory. To get a sense of how remarkable it was, remember the Grand Inquisitor episode in Dostoevsky, in which an auto-de-fé is going on, and a calm, quiet, reasonable man appears who all pundits and politicos want to put to death.

By filling his own emptiness, Obama promised to fill the emptiness of the American people. If one was not ashamed for one’s country during the preceding years, one lacked moral sensibility. Obama spoke to that shame by connecting Americans to one of the greatest moments in their history: the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. By invoking a period of which every American can be proud, he was not only implying that he could bring us together. He was also fulfilling the earliest and most profound prophecy in American culture, that of the slave spirituals, which holds that African-Americans are a chosen people, and that the country will be saved by a young Prince from among them.

But character is fate, and Obama’s emptiness could not be overcome by words alone. Long before he became President, from the moment that Hillary pulled out of the race, the void at the center of the Obama movement began to become clear. In the crucial first few months of his Presidency, when everyone wrote the obituaries of the Republican Party, Obama breathed new life into their corpse by channeling their words: bend the curve, cut spending, eliminate waste, oppose evil abroad, don’t investigate torture. Obama’s support, still potentially vast, did not openly turn against him, but disappointment, cynicism and depoliticization returned.

That set the stage for the tea-party revolt. In losing touch with America at its most affirmative — the Civil War, the New Deal, the Popular Front, the 1960s — Obama abandoned not the “center” but the heart, the lungs and the viscera of American identity to the Right. And they filled it with their own vision of the American — the rebel, the secessionist, the people who said “No” to the British, “No” to the New Deal, “No” to every version of a meddling, interfering government and, above all, as Don Pease notes, “No” to black reconstruction. For that too — paranoia, mistrust, defiance, self-confidence of the shallow, adolescent sort — is as much a part of American identity as the large-heartedness of the Civil Rights movement. And thus today it is no longer Obama who articulates the Rousseauist social compact; it is the Tea Partyists who can claim to be the real America, the shallow left mockery of them notwithstanding.

Can Obama save his Presidency? He has only one chance. Not phony populism, not more empty deal making, not high-flying but vacuous rhetoric: he has to reach down into that void and depression inside of him and speak from there to the American people. That is his only chance of restarting an honest discussion. That this cautious, ambitious but ultimately sad figure will do so is highly unlikely.