Appearing on The View, President Obama was asked whether this year’s election would be tight. He said, “When your name is Barack Obama, it’s always tight.” The View’s Joy Behar, instantly grasping his meaning, I believe, chimed in, “Barack Hussein Obama.”

To me, it could hardly be clearer that Obama was in self-pitying mode: “I am too different for white-bread America. It’s so hard to win these elections.” During the 2008 campaign, he laid great stress on his name. Over and over, he said, “They’re trying to scare you about me. ‘He’s got a funny name, you know. He doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.’” He gave some variation on this line at stop after stop.

How about the notion that Obama’s elections are “always tight”? Oh, which ones? He won his Senate seat by a landslide, after the Republicans essentially forfeited it. He won the presidency comfortably too. I think Obama protests far too much: The American voter has been very generous to him.

Anyway, we were discussing all this in the office, and a colleague disagreed with my interpretation — and Joy Behar’s interpretation, I guess — of what Obama was saying on The View. I was being too hard on him, too right-wing, too other things.

Okay. But you know how one could clear this up? Ask him. Ask Obama what he meant when he said, “When your name is Barack Obama, it’s always tight.” Isn’t there one inquiring mind in the White House press corps who would like to know?

It’s true, however, that Obama does not make himself available to the press too often. He has essentially abolished the press conference. He’ll tell Robin Roberts he’s for gay marriage, as she sits there beaming at him. He’ll chat with the ladies on The View. But really meeting the press?

There’s so much one could ask him, if one had the inclination, and the opportunity. Take the Obama campaign’s slogan, “Forward.” What does that mean? Forward to what?

And an oldie from 2008: “We are the change we’ve been waiting for.” What does that mean? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone asked the president? And he answered?

‐The Reverend Jeremiah Wright has told Edward Klein, an Obama biographer, that an Obama confidant, Eric Whitaker, offered him $150,000 if only he’d keep quiet until after Election Day. This was in 2008, of course.

Play a little game. Say a Republican president had a controversial minister in his background. And this minister told a former editor of The New York Times Magazine that a confidant of the president had offered him — well, a bribe. Wouldn’t this be the biggest story since Watergate or something?

“What did the president know, and when did he know it!”

The imbalance of the media can be stunning. If Juanita Broaddrick had made her charge — a dismayingly credible rape charge — against a Republican president, rather than Bill Clinton, she would be one of the most famous women in America.

‐If there were credible charges that a Republican administration had leaked classified information on something like the bin Laden hit, in order to aggrandize itself . . .

‐I was recently reminded that Obama worked as a community organizer. The reminder came after the president knocked Mitt Romney for his own experience (in business). I then thought of what Susan Sarandon said, after the 2008 election:

“He is a community organizer like Jesus was, and now we’re a community and he can organize us.”

Yeah, well, no matter what, Susan Sarandon is still beautiful.

‐Have you ever been quite clear on what a community organizer is? Rabble-rouser, basically?

‐One thing that struck me during the 2008 campaign was how old Obama was — not in years, but in thinking. He peddled warmed-over McGovernism, with some gassy uplift: “Hope and change” and all that. It was as though the entire Reagan experience, the collapse of the Soviet Union, even the advent of Bill Clinton, the Democratic Leadership Council, and welfare reform — it was as though all of that had passed him by. Like he had been asleep during those years. Like he emerged from a time capsule.

I think Mitt Romney agrees, judging from what he said the other day: “As President Obama and old-school liberals absorb more and more of our economy into government, they make what we do more expensive, less efficient, and less useful. They make America less competitive. They make government more expensive. What President Obama is doing is not bold; it’s old.”

Yeah.

‐After Obama attacked Romney as a “vampire,” a reader was reminded of Lenin — his “Hanging Order” from 1918: “Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.” To read the full telegram, try Wikipedia, here.

‐I have read many nicknames for Elizabeth Warren, the Senate candidate and law professor who has passed herself off as a “woman of color,” a “minority” — some kind of Cherokee. A reader of ours nicknames her “Little White Dove.” He says, “In modern America, if you simply ‘feel’ like an aboriginal, aren’t you one?”

Hmmm — guess so! I myself have thought of Warren as the Dishonest Injun, or Lying Sac(agawea).

And I’ve also traveled down Memory Lane: On the college golf team, there was a beautiful girl from Minnesota — pasty-white. I mean, Minnesota white. After I had known her for a while, someone told me that she was in college on a Native American scholarship: She claimed some tiny fraction of “Indian blood.”

“What a crock!” I thought. And I was never quite able to respect that girl, pretty as she was. You could say, “She was just gaming the system, like everyone else. She didn’t invent the system. She was just taking advantage.” Right. But it still stinks.

‐The International Olympic Committee has turned down Israel’s request to have a minute of silence at this year’s Games, in memory of the Munich massacre 40 years ago. You understand: The role of international organizations is to condemn Israel, not to remember or regret murderous violence against its citizens.

Is that too cynical for you? Not if you’ve been following the U.N. and its offspring for the last several decades, it isn’t.

‐You will recall this from the Tiananmen Square massacre: Beijing troops were reluctant to mow these people down; so the dictatorship called in troops from the hinterlands.

I thought of this when reading this Associated Press report: “President Vladimir Putin on Friday gave a senior government post to a tank factory worker who had offered to come to Moscow with fellow laborers to disperse opposition protests.”

‐For an appreciation of Peter David, whose last job was Washington bureau chief for The Economist, go here. He was one of the brightest, most interesting, and most likable journalists I ever met. After every conversation I had with him, I felt lucky to have had it. He was the kind of person who, when he talked, you remembered what he said.

Is that English? Close enough.

‐Some of his colleagues thought he was right-wing, simply because he supported the right of Israel to exist. He marveled at this. The other night, I met a young Israeli at a talk I gave. He said, “I disagree with most of what you say, but I appreciate hearing you say it.” I said, “Are you on the left?” “Way over on the left,” he said. I said, “Do you support Israel’s right to exist?” He smiled and said yes. “Then we’re friends!” I said.

With so many trying to destroy Israel — and so many denying the right of that state to exist, or making excuses for its would-be destroyers — who has time for details? I think much the same of democrats: We should all be friends, what with so many anti-democrats in the world.

‐Once, Jeane Kirkpatrick and I were talking about Jimmy Carter, and how peeved he was about Violeta Chamorro’s electoral victory over the Sandinistas. “You’d have thought a democrat would be happy,” she said.

‐There are 130 embassies in Beijing. Which one did Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident, run to when he ran? The American embassy.

In our country, there are many on the left who would have it otherwise — who want an America less prominent in the world, less a beacon. There are many on the right who agree with them.

When, oh, 2050 rolls around — or even 2035 — will the American embassy still be the one for the world’s best people, such as Chen Guangcheng, to run to? If not, I do hope some country takes our place. There ought to be a freedom defender in the world.

‐You recall that Cardinal Mindszenty lived in the American embassy for 15 years. In what embassy will such a person take refuge in the future? Will Australia, say, somehow step up? A great many Americans are tired of leadership.

‐In the next National Review, there will be a little editorial appreciation of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the great baritone who died last week. That will speak for me, as well as for the magazine. But I’ll say something a bit personal — autobiographical, actually — here.

I never heard him sing — not live. I missed him. A great and glaring gap. I did hear him conduct — the Brahms Requiem (and poorly). Better, I heard him speak: I heard him perform the speaking role in Schumann’s Manfred. All, or many, of his Fischer-Dieskauian qualities came out.

That was better than nothing — to have heard him in those roles. And thank goodness for recordings, those second-bests — those souvenirs of actual, live performance. (Sergiu Celibidache, the late Romanian conductor, took a dimmer view: “Listening to a record is like kissing a photograph of Brigitte Bardot.”)

(That is how the line has come down to us, anyway. I understand Celi did not, in fact, say “kissing.”)

‐Some more music: For my “New York Chronicle,” in the current New Criterion, go here. For my latest column in CityArts, go here. For the one before that — here.

‐C-SPAN’s Book TV has a show called After Words. I did the show, with Matt Murray, an editor at the Wall Street Journal (and a very good interviewer). This hour has had a few airings already, and will air once more on Sunday at noon. But hey: I believe you can watch the show online, here.

The book under discussion is Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World.

‐The most reasonable, truest thing I have read about “the Arab Spring,” or whatever your preferred name is, is by George W. Bush. Yes. Here.

‐A reader says, “Dear Mr. Nordlinger: I thought you might find humor in this. Ricky Martin is starring as Che Guevara in the latest Broadway production of Evita. The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife.”

If the portrayal of Guevara is admiring — that indeed is a laugh. A dark one. Guevara put the likes of Martin in camps as fast as he could. Crushed them like bugs.

‐End on something nice, though? I occasionally like to tell about my ten-year-old nephew, the Perfect Pooch. Here’s the latest:

Pooch to his mother: “Will you play catch with me?”

Mother: “Um, let me think about it. I’m kind of busy.”

Pooch to his grandmother: “Grandma, would you like to watch me and mom playing catch together?”

Grandmother: “Oh, yes.”

Pooch: “Trial-closer.”