Then, after another 20 minutes of waiting and more introductions, Biden came out. He has this move he often does when he walks out onstage: As the people applaud, he steps back and puts his arms out like he’s surprised by the reception. He did it on Monday. Then he walked to the podium, looked out at the room—the crowd was given campaign signs and American flags—and smiled. Locked in. Whether the beginning of an upstart or field-clearing campaign, this was it.

Read: When Obama talked Biden out of running for president

The speech included lines Biden says nearly every time he opens his mouth: People in Washington used to call him “Middle-Class Joe,” he said, and they didn’t mean that as a compliment; his father always told him that a job is about more than a paycheck. Some parts represented the shiny memories of Barack Obama, whom he’s been using as both a shield and a weapon—from coming out onstage to the former president’s 2012 campaign theme song, “We Take Care of Our Own” by Bruce Springsteen, to leaning hard into a defense of the Affordable Care Act. There were also some updates for 2019, such as taking an old Obama proposal for free community college (which was championed by the second lady and community-college professor Jill Biden) and explaining that he was going to pay for it by closing a specific loophole in the capital-gains tax that allows rich families to pass on massive wealth.

Biden wants voters to think that he’s earned the White House, but also that he’s working to earn it; to see him as the most electable right out of the gate, but also to give him time to build his campaign into something competitive. No one before Biden has ever run for president in three different decades, but then again, there’s no precedent for much of anything in the 2020 race. There’s never been a primary field this big, and there’s never been an incumbent whom Democrats have seen as such an existential threat to who they are and what the country’s future will look like.

“People should lower their expectations,” said a Biden friend who talked to him last week and requested anonymity because they didn’t want to speak publicly about conversations with the candidate. Biden hadn’t quite made it official then, and though he was upbeat and confident, he was also already chafing at being held to a Hillary Clinton–level standard, the friend said. Biden’s reasoning was that she’d been preparing to run for years by the time she got in the 2016 race, and he’d only gotten fully serious in the past few weeks.

Jennifer Palmieri, who was a senior adviser to Clinton’s campaign and worked with Biden as one of Obama’s White House communications directors, isn’t buying the idea that Biden can back away from being a front-runner. “I understand not wanting to be held to a higher standard than other candidates, but that is a curse of a front-runner, particularly when experience is your calling card. Particularly when you’re running against Donald Trump,” Palmieri told me. “No matter how much experience you have, voters expect you’ve thought about why you’re doing this and that you’ve thought it through.”