In which Barack Obama cleans up among the homeless

Barack Obama is the clear choice of homeless people, at least those in the Venice and Santa Monica, CA, environs, for president. Despite polling that shows Hillary Clinton doing generally better among the backbone Democratic constituencies—blue collar workers and the poor, to the extent those are distinct groups these days—almost no one in the parks and alleys and food lines supports her other than a few who think an Obama presidency would be aimed exclusively at advancing the lot of black Americans.

Hardly anyone agrees with the official Urban Refugees position, which is that whichever Democrat wins the nomination and presumably the presidency will be so crippled by recession, interest on the national debt, the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan—where we will remain for the duration—and the inevitable burst of Democratic congressional corruption, when the party wins its near-bulletproof majority, that they'll do little to improve the lot of displaced persons even should they have the inclination, which isn't at all obvious.

Regardless the realities, though, Obama, assuming he gets the nomination, will collect virtually all the homeless votes here. That could amount to about three unless someone makes an effort to register the community and scrape them off the streets in time to get to the polls, but a demographic dominated is a demographic dominated.

In truth, the needs are so overwhelming that no traditional Democratic candidate would even dream of attempting to address them. The great majority of homeless people are in desperate need of psychiatric aid or substance abuse treatment or both, and those things are in desperately short supply.

Being homeless is mentally and physically exhausting; when you see homeless people laid out during the day, the chances are good that it's because they spent the night getting chased out of doorways, parking lots and parks, and they're attempting to catch up on their sleep. Since services for the crowd are only available during the day, many homeless people eventually give up on obtaining them because of the consuming need for sleep.

The most basic unmet need of the homeless is a home. Shelters are in short supply, and ones that can provide a bed continuously for the months or longer necessary to integrate people into rehabilitation programs of any stripe are even more rare, as is permanent, low-cost housing. Not to say that everyone is a good candidate for the services, but more often than not the ones who aren't have simply been ground down to human shells lacking the capacity to strive. Most people can handle only so much indignity, discomfort, physical strain and mental stress before sinking into semi-consciousness. Lots of homeless people smell bad because after a while the relatively simple act of locating an accessible shower requires an unsustainable effort of will.

We're talking tens of billions of dollars to eradicate homelessness. We need many more social workers and mental health professionals, along with traditional health care workers. We need many more short- and long-term shelters, and tens of thousands of permanent, low-cost housing units. In short, we need an all-out refugee assistance program like the one that should have been, but wasn't, in place after Hurricane Katrina, and we need to sustain it for decades despite the inevitable sense of intractability that will at some point take hold.

Obama shows no signs of initiating or even endorsing that sort of effort even in the absence of the political and fiscal obstacles standing in the way but his rousing rhetoric still carries the day on the streets, just as it does in high-income "liberal" enclaves and an increasing number of congressional office suites. It'd be interesting to arrange a meet and greet between the candidate and those diverse constituencies.