Around here, Barack’s face has not yet faded from popularity.

It’s been ten months since January 20th, but on the streets of Washington, the president’s face can be seen looking out from shirts bearing the famous Shepard Fairey painting, from stocking caps upon which the word “OBAMA” has been spelled out in rhinestones.

Windbreakers and baseball caps, watches and ties and pins, offer everything from the logo “Yes we did!” to pictures of Barack and Michelle accompanied by pithy captions on the First Lady’s importance. To look at the average District resident, one might imagine partisanship not to be an issue, simply because there appear to be no partisans for the other side.

That state of affairs may be the function of the District, as a city, is being synonymous with the District, the political entity. Outside of the Capitol, Washington is much more emblematic of the troubles that have plagued urban areas across the country than it is as a center of power.

The city allows 17% of its residents to live below the poverty line. In 2007, one out of three of the people who live here were functionally illiterate. White flight has taken much of the city’s affluence to neighboring states, and race relations continue to suffer. Unsurprisingly, the city where George W. Bush spent eight years went 93% for Obama; these were people who badly needed to hear a message of hope and change.

And nowhere is this support more visible than in the District’s eastern half, historically the city’s poorest, where buying a shirt is less an act of preservation and more a way to send a message. “People are still buying the shirts,” says Ron Hayes, 49, who works at a t-shirt stand on the corner of 7th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. “Locals and tourists both. It’s a good mix.”

“At the beginning, it was just tremendous,” adds Joseph Sousa, 62, who also runs the stand. Both men agree that sales have tapered off somewhat – “People don’t need to buy them, they have some to wear now,” Sousa points out – but Hayes, who has worked the corner for twenty-five years, says, “Of course people will keep buying them. He’s our first black president. It’s a part of history.”

But it often appears that besides a shift in wardrobe, change has been slow to come for the president’s most enthusiastic supporters. At the school where I work – in the Trinidad neighborhood, a section of the city that was last year locked-down by the police – enthusiasm has not waned; on any given day, a preschooler or a grandmother, an aide or a teacher, can be found wearing some sort of Obama paraphernalia. But the majority of our students are still on public assistance. The shootings on our street have not stopped. The economy, inching its way upward, has had little effect on the parents who come in, month after month, and tell us that they can’t find jobs.

Nonetheless, public opinion backs the fact that even if the promised change hasn’t yet arrived, the groups to whom Obama spoke the most profoundly are still content — to varying degrees — with the promise that someday it will come. A Gallup poll released on Monday says that 47% of African-Americans are “satisfied” with the direction in which the country is headed. In the middle of 2008, that figure was 10%.

What can we surmise from these facts: the reality that, despite the lack of appreciable impact on the day-to-day lives of our country’s population, people continue to wear their president on their chest. Or perhaps a surprisingly realistic grasp of the difference between president-as-symbol and president-as-changemaker. No man could have stood up to the expectations leveled by millions of shirts bearing his face. But the perseverance of his troubled capital’s people who still sport their shirts, despite the fact that all of his or their dreams have not yet come true, suggests that the need to have someone to look up to, even if that person can’t overturn the world all at once.

Besides, there’s a certain feeling among the city’s residents that springs eternal. What is the most popular shirt that you sell? I ask Hayes, surveying a wide table of merchandise that includes every variety imaginable of the president’s face.

He looks at me. “Why,” he says, “the Hope shirt. Of course.”

Popularity: 1% [?]