Virginia's candidates for governor will face off in their first debate today, and this time, voters can watch it.

Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds will appear at the Virginia Bar Association debate, held at the Homestead.

The face-off is a tradition for Virginia statewide candidates, but usually most people see only TV news coverage of it after the event. This year, the VBA is partnering with a Web site, VirginiaTalks.com, to stream the debate live over the Internet.

VirginiaTalks.com is a project of Style Weekly, a Richmond news magazine. The site will include a discussion forum, and participants can submit questions that might get asked at the debate. VirginiaTalks is also on Twitter.

The debate begins at 11 o'clock this morning, and VirginiaTalks.com intends to keep it available online through the November general election.

This is the first chance Deeds and McDonnell have had to go head-to-head in this race. They've debated before, however. They served together in the House of Delegates; they ran against each other for attorney general in 2005; and they've appeared in a few joint forums over the past few months.

But this debate is, in a sense, a kickoff to the fall campaign, a chance for both men to put out their message and, in one segment, question each other.

Viewers can expect the debate to be "the first round of 'who is most centrist'," said George Mason University political analyst Stephen Farnsworth.

"The Deeds campaign, with its recent endorsements from a number of moderate Republicans, and the McDonnell campaign with its very aggressive efforts to present the candidate as a centrist, are fighting over the middle of the electorate," Farnsworth said. "So one of the things to expect as you look at the debates, over the summer and into the fall, is this competition for the middle ground. It makes a lot of sense. This is where elections are won and lost."

Farnsworth said McDonnell, especially, is pushing a campaign strategy that the past two Republican gubernatorial candidates--Jerry Kilgore and Mark Earley--should have tried: running on issues that appeal to moderates, not on those that appeal to the Republican base.