With plans for the 2024 presidential debates, President Biden’s campaign seemed to be getting much of what it wanted. It got the desired timeline, with Thursday night’s debate in Atlanta coming up much earlier on the calendar than normal. It caused the live audience to be removed. Above all, it got an agreement to mute the microphone of the candidate who didn’t speak, to avoid the crosstalk that turned his first 2020 debate with Donald J. Trump into a cacophonous mess.
After Thursday evening, Mr. Biden — and his party — might have wanted the crosstalk back.
CNN’s changes have prevented the shouting matches and competitive cheering that have marked recent debates. But they did not prevent Mr. Biden from beginning his hasty opening statement with a paper rasp that his campaign, before the debate was over, had determined was the result of a cold. It did not stop him from getting lost in the maze of his sentences, answer after answer.
And it didn’t stop him from concluding a speech on tax reform and health care with a spiral that was no doubt immediately filed on Republican campaigners’ hard drives: “Making sure that we’re able to make every single person eligible for what I’ve been dealing with the, uh, with the Covid, excuse me, with, uh, dealing with everything that we’ve been dealing with, uh … look … when — we finally beat Medicare.
There was no interruption. Mr. Biden came through loud and clear.
Mr. Biden can be credited with at least one achievement: For perhaps the first time since Mr. Trump announced his presidency nine years ago, he managed to hold a debate in which Mr. Trump’s performance wasn’t the biggest news afterward.
The former president and challenger had his own problems. He blustered, dodged, made false statements and repeated his denials of his 2020 election loss. He cited his golf game as evidence of his sharpness and said, “I have not had sex with a porn star.” But Mr. Trump, beaming through the mute button between answers, was familiarly outrageous and misleading; it was the standard man-bites-fact-checker narrative.
The debate in Atlanta—sorry, the “CNN Presidential Debate,” as the ubiquitous branding insisted—was fairly bare-bones. (It was also simulcast on the other major news networks.) The moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, scattered questions on a variety of topics, without correcting the candidates at the time. What resistance they did provide was limited to reminding the debaters of the amount of time they had left and pointedly asking them to answer questions they had dodged, as Ms. Bash did when she asked Mr. Trump whether he would accept the results of this election as he had not in 2020. (He gave the qualified response that he would accept a “fair” and “legal” election.)
The fact check was missed. If Mr. Trump can get away with saying something, he will, and he did, and who knows how many viewers stuck around for the eventual truth-fraud on cable after prime time?
But the other format changes were an improvement. No audience adjustment or mute switch can make candidates more honest, discourse more uplifting, or voters more satisfied with their choices. But for better or for worse, viewers should at least be able to hear.
Here was the story of the night How Mr. Biden said what he said, and how it happened. Maybe he was too well prepared. He rushed through the answers, especially at first, delivering statistics and talking points in a rapid mumble.
Or maybe he’s lost a step. After all, four years ago he shrugged off Trump’s wrath with a grin and a “Will you shut up, man?”; he filleted Paul Ryan during the 2012 vice-presidential debate. (He did all this, as he has discussed, after overcoming a stutter.)
Perhaps, of course, he was just having a bad night. But struggling with political doubts, justified or not, about his age and fitness, he had a bad night when he knew he couldn’t afford one.
I have to anticipate the inevitable objections: Yes, substance is more important than style. What presidents do has more consequences than how they tell you they will do it. Media critics like Neil Postman worried for decades that television would turn campaigns into entertainment. They were not wrong.
But no one forces the president to debate on TV. CNN has no subpoena power. Substance is more important than style, but it is through style that a leader communicates substance to the world, to Congress, to the voters. A candidate for president agrees to go into the arena, and the arena is full of cameras.
Mr. Trump, whose longest relationship is with the camera, likely benefited from the restrictions that kept him in check. Yes, the mute button prevented him from turning the debate into a braying contest of dominance. But he spent 14 seasons on “The Apprentice,” a regimented, ritualized reality show that required him to hit his marks and strike poses.
The split screen, by contrast, was cruel to Mr. Biden, who often gave a frozen, open-mouthed look as Mr. Trump attacked his record and mangled the facts.
Maybe this will have an effect on voters, maybe not. President Barack Obama was coming off a first debate in 2012 that was widely regarded as a bombshell. Despite all the reports of Democratic panic on cable news after the debate, a CNN focus group of undecided voters in Michigan was narrowly divided between the two candidates.
But there is a lesson in it anyway. You can shut down the studio and mute the crosstalk. But what comes out of your own mouth is still your fault.
