In early April 1992, a news headline in The Wall Street Journal captured the depressed mood surrounding a certain presumptive presidential nominee: “Democratic Leaders Resignedly Begin to Rally Around Clinton for President.”

Resignedly.

Now many Democrats are resignedly watching Joe Biden, worried that his uninspired telecasts from his Delaware basement could give Donald Trump another four years in the White House. No matter how hard his campaign aides worked to make the bookcase and lamp behind Biden’s desk look like a backdrop from a normal TV studio, there is a slapdash government-in-exile feel to the whole operation.

While basement-bound, Biden has done TV interview after TV interview, even launching a new podcast, but none of those efforts have made a significant imprint on the news cycle. The cable networks are broadcasting Donald Trump’s cloud-cuckoo-land daily briefings filled with imaginary Covid-19 cures and mythical supplies of coronavirus tests. And the most forceful Democratic responses are coming not from the presumptive nominee but from such embattled governors as Andrew Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer.

In truth, Biden does display a presidential level of empathy for the sick, the suffering, and the fearful. At the end of an otherwise forgettable town meeting that was livestreamed to families and children on Sunday night, Biden offered moving words about loss and tragedy: “A lot of people are hurting. A lot of people will be hurt when this is over. And we’ve got to make them whole. We can. We can. That’s what we do in the United States.”