Voting for either man seems a shot in the dark. You have to make that vote still confused about who they are, how they’ve evolved, and where they’re leading us. You have to make that vote without knowing if either would have the mettle, as president for the next four years, to face down destructive forces and restore America’s luster.

“After four years as president,” Obama told voters in Hilliard, Ohio, on Friday, “you know me.”

But do we? If we know him, why does he seem so much slighter than the Barack Obama who thrilled the country a mere four years ago?

If we know him, why were we so stunned at his crimped, self-destructive performance in the first debate, when the man usually so in control of his emotions could not contain his contempt that he was expected to justify himself while this superrich, superphony, supercilious Republican dauphin stared at him with a smarmy smile? Barry used a vulgarity about Mitt to Rolling Stone, expressing the way he truly feels, but out campaigning the past few days, he toned it down, noting that his rival tried to “massage the facts” while “I tell the truth.”

After his despondent debate and his disheartened remark that “You can’t change Washington from the inside,” the graying president has to spend his last campaign hours exhorting until he’s hoarse, working to reassure us that he’s still interested in his job. “I am a long ways away from giving up on this fight,” he said in Springfield, Ohio, on Friday. “I got a lot of fight left in me.”

When a skeptical supporter pressed, “You’re not too tired?” the president responded: “I don’t get tired. I don’t grow weary. I hope you aren’t tired either, Ohio.”

David Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed medium, strained to paint the president as filled with vigor, telling reporters in Lima, Ohio, that Obama’s exhilaration “is coming from his loins.” Twitter users quickly dubbed the president the Loin King.

The campaign played Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” at rallies in 2008 too, but in Ohio in 2012, the words have a more wistful ring to them: “Like a fool I went and stayed too long. Now I’m wondering if your love’s still strong.”