For the first time, President Barack Obama and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will meet face-to-face to discuss domestic policy. 

Obama and Romney will participate in the first of three presidential debates on Oct. 3 at the University of Denver, Colorado. The debate is set to kickoff at 9 pm. and expected to last about 90 minutes. 

Executive Editor of the PBS' NewsHour Jim Lehrer will moderate the debate and will ask the presidential candidates about the economy, health care, the role of government and governing. 

Both the Obama and Romney campaigns have lowered expectations ahead of the first debate.

Beth Myers, senior adviser of the Romney Campaign, reminded voters that this will be Romney's first one-on-one presidential debate and Obama's eighth. 

"Not only has President Obama gained valuable experience in these debates, he also won them comfortably," Meyers wrote in a memo to Romney surrogates. 

Meyers called Obama an "universally-acclaimed public speaker" and said that he enters the debates with "a significant advantage on a number of fronts."

"Voters already believe, by a 25-point margin, that President Obama is likely to do a better job in these debates," Meyers said. "Given President Obama's natural gifts and extensive seasoning under the bright lights of the debate stage, this is unsurprising. President Obama is a uniquely gifted speaker, and is widely regarded as one of the most talented political communicators in modern history."

The Romney campaign is expecting Obama to be "negative" and miss  an "opportunity to let the American people know his vision for the next four years and the policies he'd pursue."

"That's not an opportunity Mitt Romney will pass up," Meyers said. "He will talk about the choice between President Obama's government-centric vision and Mitt Romney's vision for an opportunity society with more jobs, higher take-home pay, a better-educated workforce, and millions of Americans lifted out of poverty into the middle class."

But, in an interview with ABC's "This Week," Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who gave the keynote at the RNC in Tampa, said that he has "absolute confidence" that the morning after the debate everyone will be "shaking your head, saying it's a brand-new race with 33 days to go."

"Every time Mitt Romney has been confronted in this campaign with one of these moments, he has come through in the debate and performing extraordinarily well," Christie said.

Romney spending most of Tuesday in debate prep at a Denver hotel with Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio who is playing Obama in mock debate sessions.

The Obama team said the president will spend the final hours leading up to the debate, "sharpening his answers and shortening the time it takes to make them." John Kerry is filling in as Romney. 

According to Jen Psaki, traveling press secretary for the Obama campaign, Obama has not had much time to prepare for the debates because of "constraints of governing"

"The president will have some time to prepare and he's been doing some studying, but it is certainly less than we have anticipated because of events in the Middle East, because of his busy travel schedule -- because of just the constraints of governing, Pskai said. "Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has been preparing earlier and with more focus than any presidential candidate in modern history. Not John F. Kennedy. Not President Bill Clinton. Not President George Bush. Not Ronald Reagan has prepared as much as he has. So there's no question that he will have a lead on how prepared he is."