President Obama will not spend the bulk of tonight’s presidential debate mumbling secret messages to his shoes, as he seemed to be doing in his famously disastrous first debate with Mitt Romney two weeks ago. This time, he will be “loaded for bear,” as bitter clingers might say.

That is why this debate ought to be really fun to watch. Desperate to make up for his last performance, but unable to defend his dreadful record as President, Obama can be expected to attack Romney with more enthusiasm than Joe Biden at open mike night at a Delaware dive bar.

From the President who once offered “hope and change” and an end to politics as usual in Washington, we can expect to hear this message: Mitt Romney is a rich elitist who doesn’t care about you or your family and who will take government benefits away from you so he can cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires.

This is a dishonest message, and not one on which a successful President runs. A successful President runs on his record and asks the voters to stay the course. Obama is not doing that. He rarely mentions his signature domestic achievements — Obamacare and the stimulus — because they are so unpopular. He brings up the killing of Osama bin Laden, but still denounces, incredibly, the Bush administration policies that helped our military and intelligence agencies find him. He wants to talk about anything but the economy, Medicare, the debt, the deficit and his latest failure, Libya.

To avoid those issues, he misrepresents Romney’s positions in the hope that voters will find them scary.

All of this comes from a man who issued a TV ad in the Democratic presidential primary in 2007 that said, “The same old Washington politics won’t fix our problems.” They wouldn’t then, and they won’t now. But they might just work to reelect a failed politician, which is why the one failed politician on the stage tonight will be using them.