During his interview on 60 Minutes (22 March ‘09), President Obama mentioned the difficult jail-like “bubble” that is the White House. “[O]ne of the things that I am constantly struggling with is how to break out of it,” Obama says. He’s taken to reading ten letters every day “just to hear voices from outside of my staff.“

Is Obama’s White House bubble really all that different from anybody else’s everyday bubble? I’m talking about the sort of everyday bubble of which Felix Guattari said, in short, that the functional awareness of the dominant socius correlates to an active misrecognition of reality’s dimensions.

For a peek at Obama’s iteration of the above quotes, follow any of the links in the first paragraph of this post, and watch the last part of the second video posted there.

Obama’s bubble is no small matter. It may in part explain why he refuses to consider asking the scandal-embroiled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to step down, despite his having extorted American taxpayers for a few trillion dollars. In fact, Obama laughs at the notion, and insists that Geithner isn’t going anywhere.

How is Obama’s adamance on the issue any different than any other instance of impunity with which the White House has operated in the past several decades? Everyone wants to talk about “never again” in cases like the destruction of the World Trade Towers, but not when it comes to what author Naomi Klein has called a multi-trillion-dollar crime scene. Something about which Obama can joke and Americans still have hope. The bubble is unbelievable.

When will the markets take a more realistic view of Sen. Obama’s chances?

Despite the fact that he trails McCain by nearly 10 points in my projections when likely voters are taken into account, and trails by 301-228 in the projections of Electoral Vote.com (run by a Democrat activist), the markets are predicting that his chances of becoming president are virtually evens. This is completely inexplicable to the rational voter, Even if you give him a 80% chance of winning the Democratic nomination (which is ridiculous), that still implies that he has a 58% chance of beating McCain. Obviously, Bush’s unpopularity will play to the advantage of the Democrats, but even so this didn’t stop Nicolas Sarkozy in France (and the US doesn’t have unemployment in double digits). So what will be the catalyst for the Obama’s chances to reduce? The technical indications seem to indicate a reversal in sentiment with Obama’s price hovering just below the 50 day moving average and a (very uncertain) downward trendline but they aren’t particularly strong.

My belief is that a defeat in Pennsylvania will finally bring the markets to their senses. If Obama loses by 10% or more in a in a key Blue state he will have demonstrated that he has problems with blue collar voters, problems which cannot be filled with either a few ‘crunchy conservatives’ (who will return to McCain in the final analysis) or students (who probably won’t vote).