A lunchtime town meeting in the college town of Ames, home to Iowa State, should attract a sizable crowd less than two weeks before the Iowa caucuses—especially when a former vice president, who is leading in some of the recent Iowa polls, headlines the event.

But Joe Biden is perhaps the most confounding candidate in this Democratic race. By my charitable count, only 250 would-be caucusgoers attended his event in Ames on Tuesday.

They were treated to such Biden staples as a paean to dead senators he once worked with: Iowa’s John Culver died in 2018, Ted Kennedy in 2009, and Tom Eagleton in 2007. He offered a somewhat exaggerated version of Richard Nixon’s victory margin in Delaware in 1972, the year that the 29-year-old Biden upset expectations, winning his Senate seat by a narrow margin. And there was a moving reference to his late son Beau’s military service in Kosovo during the NATO military operations in the 1990s.

As is typical with Biden, the applause after an hour of stump speech and questions was affectionate yet perfunctory. On the way out, I ran into Alan Vandehaar, a retired adult education professor, whose opening words were, “That was uninspiring.”

This is the Biden perplex.