(Bloomberg) --

With no campaign events to headline and the public’s attention consumed by the coronavirus pandemic, Joe Biden is struggling to stay relevant and acknowledging frustration at being on the sidelines of a devastating national crisis.

So the Democratic presidential front-runner has built a shadow war room of public health and economic experts to keep him engaged on the issue, with academics, medical experts and Obama administration alumni advising him on a response, just as they would a sitting president.

He’s rolled out recommendations on the only policy Americans currently care about, plans that also give voters a window into a possible alternative come November.

And like the vice president he was, he eagerly urges President Donald Trump to consider his advice, promising not to try to seize credit if one of his ideas were adopted. When Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway suggested on television that perhaps Biden ought to call the White House and share his ideas, he quickly -- and publicly -- accepted the offer. The call hasn’t yet taken place.

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Such is how Biden is managing one of the strangest election years in memory. He doesn’t have the nomination yet, Bernie Sanders is still in the race, the primaries are on hold, and the July Democratic convention will take place in August -- maybe. Unlike Sanders, a U.S. senator, Biden has no government job and is riding out the pandemic from his home in Delaware.

He’s in a no man’s land of high expectations to stay engaged but few means of doing so. After 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president, he’s closer to occupying the Oval Office than he ever has been, and yet has no access to the levers of policy making.

“There’s some frustration,” Biden said last week.

Instead, he holds two daily meetings by telephone and the broader activities of his war room help keep him involved.

“He recognizes he’s not in government so what’s available to him is a platform to make an argument for a better course,” said Jake Sullivan, a longtime Biden adviser who’s helping coordinate the candidate’s coronavirus response as a volunteer.

Biden offered his first pandemic response plan in mid-March and last week released a “make it work” checklist of ideas on how to implement the $2 trillion CARES Act, drawing in part on his experience overseeing the distribution of economic stimulus money in 2009.

‘Who’s Accountable?’

“He has a lot of crisis experience of saying, what are the tasks? Who’s accountable for them? How are they being delivered?” Sullivan said. “I think that the vice president wakes up every morning, sees the results of the current policies, Donald Trump’s shortcomings, and thinks, ‘I wish I could be there to be doing it better.’ Not out of a sense of boastfulness or pride but out of a sense of genuine concern that this country and our people are being badly served.”

Biden’s national security adviser in the White House and one of the leaders of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign policy shop, Sullivan is working with the campaign’s policy director, Stef Feldman, on its coronavirus efforts. Ron Klain, who first worked on Biden’s 1987 White House bid, was President Barack Obama’s Ebola response coordinator and is part of the Biden war room.

That war room got him out front early on coronavirus, including with a Jan. 27 op-ed in USA Today -- when the U.S. had just a handful of Covid-19 cases, nationwide -- warning that Trump was “the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health challenge.”

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Each work day for Biden begins with a pair of phone calls with experts, one about health care and the other on the economy. They help him prepare for TV appearances and to brainstorm policy proposals. They also help keep him grounded in the familiar. People who’ve been on the calls say they’re much like the briefings he would’ve gotten from staff and outside advisers while he was vice president.

The health briefings are “very detailed, data-driven, scientifically and medically-driven,” said David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, who is usually on the roughly hour-long calls.

The team briefs Biden on the latest state, national and international case totals, and discusses patterns and projections for illnesses and deaths as Biden follows along in a document that includes a dozen or so epidemiological charts. They talk about availability of beds, ventilators and personal protective equipment across the country, and how the federal government and companies have responded to shortages in some areas. They update him about the research that’s being conducted on treatments and vaccines and on next steps.

“He absorbs everything and comes back and asks the right questions,” Kessler said.

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Kessler was appointed to the FDA by President George H.W. Bush and served until early in President Bill Clinton’s second term. Others on the panel have ties to Obama administration, including Zeke Emanuel, an architect of the Affordable Care Act; former Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco; and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Two others, Rebecca Katz, an associate professor in Georgetown University’s department of microbiology and immunology, and Irwin Redlener, a clinical professor at the Columbia University Mailman Public School of Health, are top public health experts.

Biden’s son-in-law, Howard Krein, a head and neck cancer surgeon in Philadelphia and the chief medical officer of StartUp Health, a health care investment firm, has also been on the health call.

Biden’s economic calls vary in subject by day and have included his former top White House economic adviser, Jared Bernstein, who’s now senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Heather Boushey, the president and CEO of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

Off The Trail

The same team played a key role in mid-March in changing how Biden’s campaign operated, just as it was finally hitting its stride.

Biden had addressed the virus as a policy issue since January, but it didn’t start to affect his team until early March. Biden was drawing the largest crowds of his campaign after his South Carolina win on Feb. 29, and advance staffers rushed to buy enough hand sanitizer for attendees to use before jamming shoulder-to-shoulder in school gyms.

After attending church on March 8, Biden served himself from the buffet at Pearl’s Southern Cooking in Jackson, Mississippi, as a dozen journalists crammed between two rows of chafing dishes. He applied sanitizer before picking up his fork.

“We’re listening to the experts and the CDC and taking advice from them. Whatever advice they give me, we’ll take,” he said. But even as health experts began discouraging handshakes, Biden went in for hugs with senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer at a Detroit rally on March 9.

When Ohio’s governor banned large gatherings on March 10, Biden’s campaign canceled its primary-night party in Cleveland and moved the event to Philadelphia, limiting the audience to staffers -- who still hugged to celebrate his wins. On March 12, Biden held a press conference on the coronavirus response for which dozens of journalists crowded into a hotel ballroom.

Even as the campaign was still convening crowds, it was also asking the public health committee for advice on how to operate. The group advised canceling the two remaining campaign rallies on his schedule and closing campaign headquarters and all field offices. Within hours, those trips had been canceled and plans for the offices to close were announced.

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