Keeping people waiting while you make up your overburdened, brooding mind whether or not to run for president is a gambit that generally only works when everybody understands that the candidate’s professed ambivalence is a sham. Did anyone believe Kamala Harris, for instance, when she said she’d be using the Senate’s Christmas break to make her final decision about going for the gold in 2020? Once she announced she was running, the pretense that she’d ever considered doing anything else vanished in a week-long campaign roll-out so expertly constructed that the average Maserati looked randomly glued together by comparison. But only a naif would chirp, “Gosh, she certainly fooled us.”

Joe Biden, on the other hand, has played the hesitation game like a violin. The problem is that he seems to be unaware that his trusty Stradivarius is gradually going too out of tune to play “Hail to The Chief” properly. If he’s only faking being undecided about whether to jump into the presidential sweepstakes, he’s turning out to be too good at the imposture to keep the political class happy.

Last week, The Washington Post ran a lengthy story about erstwhile Biden loyalists getting fed up with the former Veep’s waffling, including potential Team Joe operatives who’ve signed up with other campaigns because they don’t want to keep hanging around for a thumbs-up that may never come. It read very much like a warning that Biden had better piss or get off the pot soon, because it wasn’t generated by any newsworthy new developments in his hypothetical campaign. It was a manifestation of the mainstream media’s growing impatience at the lack of any.

Reportedly, Biden himself believes he’s got no need to rush. By his reckoning, his name recognition alone is bound to make him the overnight front-runner no matter how long he postpones tossing his hat in the ring. That might even have been true once, but the Democratic Party is hardly in the mood for a pre-anointed candidate these days.

If Biden thinks that the electorate’s familiarity with him will instantly make him look like the most reassuring choice available, he’s underestimating the rising generation’s appetite for novelty. It’s already being taken for granted that the 2020 ticket had darned well better include a woman or a person of color to galvanize key Democratic voting blocs. The rules have changed with such bewildering speed that even settling for sticking one in the No. 2 spot behind the usual complacent white dude may not be enough to do the trick anymore.

This election cycle’s accelerated timetable—with 11 contenders already officially in the race, and more clustering in the wings—is making conventional political wisdom look as obsolete as a vintage copy of The Farmer’s Almanac. For once, nobody is complaining about the process getting underway prematurely, let alone wishing for a respite from the 2018 midterms’ hurly-burly before we all wade back into the fray. If anything, progressives and liberals alike are so eagerly champing at the bit to see Donald J. Trump evicted from office that the electoral calendar’s intractability is driving them up the wall for the opposite reason. They’d be thrilled if the New Hampshire primary was next week, not a lo-o-ong year away.

The magical thinking at work seems to be that the sooner the race for the Democratic nomination jumps into high gear, the sooner Trump will be out of a job—a fantasy that Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker have all turned to their advantage by behaving as if there’s no time to lose. As a result, Biden’s belief that he can operate on his own, more traditional schedule risks making him look less like the heavyweight whose entry everyone is clamoring for than a latecomer who’s sorely bereft of the requisite sense of urgency. Bernie Sanders has been able to get away with staying on the sidelines up to now because his fan base genuinely is clamoring for him. Except among party apparatchiks who desperately crave a return to business as usual—and good luck with that, fellas—Biden doesn’t arouse that kind of zeal.

If he runs, he’ll instantly be perceived as the Establishment candidate, which is awfully unlikely to be of much benefit to him. His natural constituency will be the timorous types who want a safe centrist to counteract the Democrats’ new leftward tilt, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal to practically everybody else’s endorsement of some form of universal health care, tax hikes on the rich, or free college for all. However, that role hardly suits Biden’s preferred image of himself, since he’s happiest posturing as an old-fashioned, fighting liberal with his own raft of fresh ideas—no matter how long it’s been since he’s had any.

At the same time, he can’t help making the case that he deserves to be president because—shades of Hillary—no one is more qualified, which only reminds people what a Washington lifer he is. (Being the anti-Ocasio-Cortez is no bowl of cherries.) Biden’s partisans argue that he’s the candidate best positioned to bring back the working-class, white Rust Belt voters who defected to Trump in 2016. But how that will offset the probable disenchantment of the African Americans, women and millennials that the 2020 Democratic nominee will most need to energize in order to prevail is something nobody has convincingly explained.

You can’t help suspecting that the real explanation for Biden’s hesitation about entering the race—whether it’s genuine, he’s just playing coy, or he’s buffeted by some combination of the two—is simply that he hates the thought of being rejected for his ultimate dream job yet again. He’s run twice for president before, and both bids went off the rails early. In 1988, he was done in when he got caught plagiarizing British politician Neil Kinnock’s speeches, and his second try 20 years later ended with an inglorious fifth-place finish in the 2008 Iowa caucuses. His best shot would probably have been in 2016, when he was Obama’s incumbent Vice-President, but—to his own frequently expressed later regret—that was the race he decided to sit out. There’s no question that Biden would still love to be president, but only if winning the nomination looked like a sure thing. And even he knows that the Democratic Party just doesn’t do coronations anymore.