Joe Biden brought his “No Malarkey” tour to a New Hampshire debate stage on Friday night. But in promising to tell the truth, he accidentally exposed his own doleful (or I should say, Bob Dole-ful) prospects in Tuesday’s opening-gun primary.

In his first words of the debate—the moment when candidates are usually the most scripted—Biden confessed, “I took a hit in Iowa, and I’ll probably take a hit here.” It was a novel campaign strategy; few candidates ever say, “Vote for me because I’m going to lose here.”

If his comments were a brief misstep in an otherwise smooth debate, it would have been one thing. But throughout the evening, Biden adopted a combative tone that undercut one of his strongest assets as a candidate—his avuncular persona. Biden may merely have been frustrated; the 77-year-old can see himself losing New Hampshire to the dewy Pete Buttigieg (who was born during Biden’s second term in the Senate) and to the perpetual left-wing Senate gadfly Bernie Sanders. But he ought to know better: The night Bob Dole lost the 1988 New Hampshire GOP primary, he snapped at George H.W. Bush in a television interview, “Stop lying about my record.” Friday night in Manchester, Biden seemed ready to shout, “Stop ignoring my 47-year record.”

It all came to the surface when Buttigieg made his standard generational attack on “the politics of the past” and stressed the need to “bring change in Washington before it’s too late.”

For Biden, the ultimate Washington candidate, this was too much. Playing his remember-whose-veep-I-was card, Biden said with exasperation, “I don’t know what about the past of Barack Obama and Joe Biden was so bad. What happened? What is it that he wants to do away with?”