That old Walter Mitty thing doesn't stop for Joe Biden.

He was there as vice president at the Parkland shooting. He was shot at in Iraq. He was a coal miner. His chopper was shot down by bin Laden himself over Afghanistan. Always the irrelevant placeholder, dating at least from his Obama years when he had to beg Obama to quit making fun of him, the former vice president and now Democratic frontrunner has decided to conduct pretend presidential briefings on the coronavirus crisis to upstage President Trump.

According to Fox News:

The all-but-certain Democratic presidential nominee — in a conference call with political reporters — also said that as early as Monday he hopes to be holding near-daily briefings regarding the pandemic that's swept across the nation, which could serve as a political counterbalance to the daily briefings the president and government officials have been giving the past week from the White House. "I want to be in daily or least in significant contact with the American people and communicate what I would be doing, what I think we should be doing, and how we should be doing it," Biden emphasized. "Hopefully by Monday we're going to be in a very different place in terms of the ability to be in communications with all of you," Biden explained.

That's all fine and dandy for persuading a skeptical electorate that, despite his handsiness, his mental lapses, and his gaffes, he really is a presidential type.

But it leaves a bad taste at a time like this one. President Trump is leading the nation for real from the coronavirus crisis, bearing all the weight of his office, often looking haggard and stressed, and now he's got this icky backseat driver, trying to score public relations points for himself and win votes by playing president behind him, often repeating Trump's own decisions and claiming them as his own. Biden knows that the nation is rallying around Trump, as in wartime, and instead of supporting him on this one thing as the rest of the nation is doing, Biden is exploiting the briefings by mirroring them for his own advantage. He's trying to pretend to be President Trump. It's not very different from his recent plagiarism of Trump's steps to halt the coronavirus, claiming that that plan was all his own.

For Biden to put up some cocked up version of the presidential briefing in order to get attention for himself, impersonating the actual president, is revolting. It's nothing but a selfish, pathetic, and desperate bid to stay in the news and seem relevant. It's likely he's getting some feedback that the gambit is working for him. But being Joe Biden, he's also likely to reveal just how out of touch he is. This Breitbart story from yesterday shows Biden in all his clueless glory:

During a call with reporters, the Democrat frontrunner said he is "desperately" looking to be in contact with Americans, and, "They tell me there's ways we can do teleconferencing via us all being in different locations."

Apparently, he's just heard of this, no malarkey, kiddos.

My money's on him making more indications of his own irrelevance from this stunt. That's just who he is.

Image credit: Photo illustration by Monica Showalter via public domain source and image by Bangdoll via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.