Awww…looks like baby Bush grew up a little over the weekend. Good for him.

Negotiators for President Bush and Democrat John F. Kerry agreed Monday to three 90-minute debates beginning Sept. 30, including one town-hall format with questions from undecided voters in the audience.

The two campaigns essentially went along with recommendations by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. However, the topic for the first debate will be foreign policy and homeland security rather than the economy, as the commission had suggested.

The final debate, which the commission had said should be about foreign policy, will be about the economy.

So what’s the deal here? Was the Bush campaign’s wishy-washy act a ploy to lower expectations? Or did they realize that you can’t run as a tough guy if you’re gonna act like a chicken?

The one big change here is the flipping of the two debate topics. I wrote previously that I think the schedule favored Kerry a bit, since he hadn’t even started his attacks on Iraq yet. Now that he’s got a week and a half to get some cred on Iraq, you can see why he gave such a badass speech this morning. If Kerry knows what’s good for him, he’ll give a speech that tough every day until the debate.

As far as the third debate, the momentum going into it is a toss-up right now. The last employment report prior to the election is gonna be on Oct. 8th. If it’s good news for Bush, he could ride a wave of “we’re turning the corner” into the confrontation and try the old “don’t change horses mid-stream” trick. It’s more likely that the numbers will be lukewarm and not really help or hurt either side. If those numbers don’t help, I’d advise Kerry to seize on the state unemployment figures like I did in this post and this post. The economy still sucks in some of the states that Kerry needs to win.

What about the middle debate? Well, on paper I’m one of those who think Bush’s speaking style is especially suited for the townhall format. Any time Bush doesn’t have to use big words, he’s got an advantage. On the other hand, this will probably be one of the handfull of times over the last four years in which he’s had to ask any hard questions. Considering that the audience can ask any question they want, the possibility of Bush getting thrown off-balance by a question he doesn’t expect is pretty high. Personally, I wanna hear someone ask him “Mr. President, how much money have you personally made from your tax cuts and how much do you stand to make if they become permanent?”