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With the plans for the 2024 presidential debates, President Biden\u2019s campaign appeared to get much of what it wanted<\/a>. It got its preferred timeline, with Thursday night\u2019s debate in Atlanta<\/a> far earlier on the calendar than usual. It got the live audience removed. It got, above all, an agreement to mute the microphone on the candidate who wasn\u2019t speaking, to avoid the cross-talk that made his first 2020 debate with Donald J. Trump a cacophonous mess<\/a>.<\/p>\n After Thursday night, Mr. Biden \u2014 and his party \u2014 might have wanted the cross-talk back.<\/p>\n The changes that CNN instituted staved off the shouting matches and the competitive cheering that have marked past debates. But they could not prevent Mr. Biden from starting his rushed opening remarks in a papery rasp that, before the debate was over, his campaign was stressing to reporters was the result of a cold. It did not keep him from getting lost in the corn maze of his sentences, answer after answer.<\/p>\n And it did not keep him from finishing an argument on tax reform and health care with a spiral that was surely saved instantly to the hard drives of Republican campaign operatives: \u201cMaking sure that we\u2019re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I\u2019ve been able to do with, the, uh, with the Covid, excuse me, with, um, dealing with, everything we had to do with, uh \u2026 look \u2026 if \u2014 we finally beat Medicare.\u201d<\/p>\n There was no interruption. Mr. Biden came across loud and unclear.<\/p>\n You can at least credit Mr. Biden for one accomplishment: For perhaps the first time since Mr. Trump announced for president nine years ago, he managed to hold a debate in which Mr. Trump\u2019s performance was not the biggest news afterward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The former president and challenger had his own issues. He blustered, dodged, made false statements and repeated his denials of his 2020 election loss. He cited his golf game as proof of his acuity and uttered the line, \u201cI didn\u2019t have sex with a porn star.\u201d But Mr. Trump, kept to glowering between answers by the mute button, was outrageous and misleading in a familiar way; it was the standard man-bites-fact-checker story.<\/p>\n The debate in Atlanta \u2014 sorry, the \u201cCNN Presidential Debate,\u201d as the ubiquitous branding emphasized \u2014 was fairly bare-bones. (It was also simulcast on the other major news networks.) The moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper<\/a>, spread questions across a variety of topics, not correcting candidates in the moment. The pushback they gave was limited to reminding the debaters of how much time they had left and firmly asking them, again, to answer questions they had sidestepped, as Ms. Bash did when asking Mr. Trump if he would accept the results of this election as he had not in 2020. (He gave the qualified answer that he would accept a \u201cfair\u201d and \u201clegal\u201d election.)<\/p>\n The fact-checking was missed. If Mr. Trump can get away with saying anything, he will, and he did, and who knows how many viewers stuck around for the eventual cable truth-squadding after prime time?<\/p>\n But the other format changes were an improvement. No audience tweak or mute switch can make candidates more honest, discourse more ennobling or voters more satisfied with their choices. But viewers should, for better or worse, at least be able to hear.<\/p>\n Here, the story of the night was how<\/em> Mr. Biden said what he said, and how this happened. Maybe he was over-prepared. He rushed through answers, especially early on, gushing statistics and talking points in a speed-mumble.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Or maybe he has lost a step. Four years ago, after all, he sloughed off Mr. Trump\u2019s raging with grins and a \u201cWill you shut up, man?\u201d; he filleted Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice-presidential debate. (He did all this, as he has discussed, having overcome a stutter<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Maybe, of course, he just had a bad night. But contending with political doubts, fair or not, about his age and fitness, he had a bad night when he knew he could not afford one.<\/p>\n I should anticipate the inevitable objections: Yes, substance matters more than style. What presidents do has more consequence than how they tell you they\u2019ll do it. Media critics like Neil Postman<\/a> worried for decades that television would turn campaigning into entertainment. They were not wrong.<\/p>\n But no one forces the president to debate on TV. CNN does not have subpoena power. Substance outweighs style, but it is through style that a leader communicates substance to the world, to Congress, to voters. Someone who runs for president agrees to enter the arena, and the arena is full of cameras.<\/p>\n