(CBS News) Mitt Romney's speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa last week received a lower score than any presidential candidate's convention speech since the poll starting asking the question after Republican and Democratic conventions in 1996, according to the polling firm Gallup.

Only 38 percent of respondents said his speech was excellent or good, compared to 47 percent who thought 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain's speech was excellent or good. McCain's acceptance speech received the next lowest approval ratings in Gallup's polling. Ten percent of respondents also said Romney's speech was terrible, twice the percentage who thought McCain's speech, which received the second highest negative rating, was terrible.

Respondents in the same Gallup poll are split on if Romney's speech would make them more or less likely to vote for the Republican candidate. Forty percent of voters said they are more likely to vote for him while 38 percent of voters said they are less likely; 22 percent said they don't know or their opinion did not change. The margin of error is 4 percentage points and 1,045 adults were polled between August 31 and September 1.

Unsurprisingly, Romney's speech appealed more to Republicans, with 83 percent who said it makes them more likely to vote for him. Only nine percent of Democrats, meanwhile, said they are more likely to vote for Romney after hearing his speech.

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The Democratic National Convention starts this week in Charlotte, North Carolina, with key speeches by President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton and others.

Festivities kick off on Tuesday, following Labor Day. Here's a look at events to watch this week, which will be streamed live on CBSNews.com.

Tuesday, starting at 10 p.m. ET:

San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro will deliver the keynote address.

First Lady Michelle Obama will deliver remarks.

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(CBS News) As the Democratic National Convention swings into full gear, new Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney plans to spend much of the week in private preparing for the fall's debates with President Obama, with no public appearances currently planned.

After spending Sunday and Monday at his summer home on New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee, Romney will travel to Reading, Vt., for several practice sessions at the home of Kerry Healey, who served as his lieutenant governor in Massachusetts. Joining them will be Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who was tapped recently by the Romney campaign to portray Obama in the mock sessions after the rave reviews he received for playing Obama during GOP nominee John McCain's debate prep in 2008.

Romney's campaign previously had said he would be making public appearances this week during the Democratic convention, but senior adviser Kevin Madden told reporters on Saturday that no public events are now on the schedule. However, he acknowledged that events could be added in the coming days.

While Romney will spend the week studying up, vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan will kick off his week a mere 250 miles from Charlotte with a trip to the eastern side of North Carolina, where campaign aides say he will ask voters, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

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(CBS News) BOULDER, Colo. - Knowing that cheers and applause from supporters won't get him re-elected, President Obama told some 13,000 supporters here at the University of Colorado to make sure they were registered to vote, along with their friends, family and classmates.

He called for a Rocky Mountain Showdown between his supporters at rivals University of Colorado and Colorado State to register the most voters.

When his supporters booed at his mention of the Mitt Romney agenda, as they did today, Mr. Obama told them: "Don't boo - vote." It's become a boilerplate line in his campaign speeches.

He defended his policies and took plenty of swipes at those of Mitt Romney and the Republicans, but he all but begged his crowds to make sure they can vote.

He urged them to go online at GottaRegister.com - apologizing to English teachers for the "gotta" in the website name.

His rally today marked Mr. Obama's 13th visit to Colorado as president and his eighth this year. The frequency of his trips here reflects the importance his campaign strategy places on keeping Colorado and its nine electoral votes in his win column. It's a state he won in 2008 by a 9-point margin, 54 percent to 45 percent, but which polls now show to be a toss-up.

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(CBS News) Mitt Romney attended a service at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Wolfeboro, N.H., on Sunday morning and drew praise from several of its members for shining a positive light on the Mormon religion, according to a media pool report.

"There has never been as much positive attention to the church, thanks to the wonderful campaign of Mitt Romney and his family," J.W. Marriott Jr., the current chairman of the hotel chain Marriott International, Inc., said during a testimony portion of the service.

The Marriott family has deep ties to Romney, dating back to a close friendship between J. Willard Marriott Sr. (founder of the hotel chain) and Mitt Romney's father, George, the former chairman and president of American Motors Corporation and former Michigan governor. In fact, Mitt Romney's proper name - Willard Mitt Romney - was a tribute to the Marriott's founder.

J.W. Marriott Jr. told those at the morning church service that 90 percent of what's been written and said about the Mormon faith during the recent presidential election has been positive, including television programs focusing on the faith by CNN and NBC and several front-page newspaper stories.

"And that's a great tribute to Mitt and Ann and their family for living such an exemplary life," he. said. "A life of love and compassion, a good Latter Day Saint life. A life of leadership, reaching out to others, and touching others, and worshipping the Lord and putting families and the church first."

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(CBS News) YORK, Pa. - Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday kept up his party's push to highlight its foreign-policy differences with Mitt Romney, suggesting the Republican nominee is overly eager to engage militarily in the Middle East.

"He implies by the speech that he's ready to go to war in Syria and Iran," Biden said of Romney in a speech to more than 1,000 supporters here. "And these guys say the president is out of touch?"

Though Romney did not focus on foreign policy in his Republican National Convention address -- he has come under criticism for making no reference to the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan -- he said Obama "has thrown allies like Israel under the bus" and that "every American is less secure today because he has failed to slow Iran's nuclear threat."

In addition, the former Massachusetts governor gave a tough critique of the Obama administration's foreign policy in a speech to the American Legion in Indianapolis last week. In that speech, Romney asserted his view that "a just and peaceful world depends upon our strength and our confidence," and has said he would send troops to Syria if necessary to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into terrorists' hands.

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(CBS News) URBANDALE, Iowa (CBS) - At his first campaign rally since the Republican convention's final night, when Mitt Romney delivered his speech accepting his party's presidential nomination, President Obama said Saturday that all the GOP rhetoric boiled down to this: "Everything's bad, it's Obama's fault and Governor Romney is the only one who knows the secret to creating jobs and growing the economy."

"It was something to behold," he said.

Relishing this first opportunity to fire back at the opposition party's gathering in Tampa, Mr. Obama said the agenda the Republicans offered was more often than not "better suited for last century."

"It was a rerun," Mr. Obama said of the policies offered up at the GOP convention. "We'd seen it before. You might as well have watched it on a black and white TV."

Addressing some 10,000 people on a farm in this town outside Des Moines, the president argued, "There was a lot of talk about bold truths and hard choices" at the GOP event. But, he said, "Nobody actually bothered to tell you what they were."

Mr. Obama said Romney "did not offer a a single new idea - just retreads of the same old policies that have been sticking it to the middle class for years."

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(CBS News) Responding to a petition boasting 12,000+ signatures and Freedom of Information Act requests, the Obama administration on Saturday released some previously-undisclosed, in-demand information: The White House beer recipe.

In a pun-laden blog post on the White House website, White House assistant chef and senior policy advisor for healthy food initiatives Sam Kass laid out instructions for brewing the "White House Honey Ale," and the "White House Honey Porter," apparently "the first alcohol brewed or distilled on the White House grounds."

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(CBS News) CINCINNATI, Ohio - Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, basking in the afterglow of his convention and acceptance speech, predicted a different kind of gathering for the Democratic Party's convention beginning Tuesday in Charlotte.

"It's not going to be as happy as ours was," Romney told an overflow group of some 500 people who could not be squeezed into the central terminal of a train station and museum where Romney held a rally with Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and House Speaker John Boehner.

Later, Romney raised several of the themes from his convention speech to the crowd of several thousand in the central terminal, arguing that President Obama had failed to deliver on promises made to the American electorate four years ago.

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(CBS News) In his weekly radio and Internet address kicking off Labor Day weekend, President Obama reflected on the importance of supporting members of the U.S. military, both during active service and afterward, and pledged "to do everything in our power to keep them safe and help them succeed."

The Republican National Committee (RNC), meanwhile, released its own weekly address, discussing Hurricane Isaac and the economy.

The president, who visited troops in Fort Bliss, Texas on Friday, marked the second anniversary of the end of the Iraq War, celebrating "how far we've come" while acknowledging the nation's continued presence in Afghanistan.

"Some of the soldiers I met at Fort Bliss had just come home from the battlefield, and others are getting ready to ship out," he said in his radio address. "As long as we have a single American in harm's way, we will continue to do everything in our power to keep them safe and help them succeed. That means giving them a clear mission and the equipment they need on the front lines."

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Updated with additional comments Saturday, 8:21 a.m. ET

(CBS News) KENNER, La. -- A senior adviser to Mitt Romney's campaign acknowledged on Friday that actor/director Clint Eastwood veered off previously discussed talking points in his controversial Republican National Convention address, but said the Republican nominee enjoyed the speech and found it "funny."

"I was backstage with him and he was laughing," said the adviser, Stuart Stevens, speaking to reporters aboard Romney's charter flight in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

The New York Times, quoting unnamed aides, said Eastwood's speech seemed to startle and unsettle the Romney campaign, and that several of them took pains to distance themselves from the decision to put him onstage without a script that had been rehearsed like virtually all other prime-time convention addresses.

Eastwood's speech, which went for 12 minutes instead of the allotted five, consisted largely of a meandering indictment of President Obama, with the Hollywood icon addressing an empty chair to represent Mr. Obama. He touched on a variety of topics, from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay to the war in Afghanistan, while also getting in digs at Biden -- whom he called "a grin with a body behind it" -- and seemingly made a coarse joke about the president.

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(CBS News) FORT BLISS, Texas -- In an official trip marking the two year anniversary of the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, President Obama on Sunday defended his foreign policy record, making an apparent response to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's Thursday night remarks at the Republican Convention.

"If you hear anyone trying to say that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, don't you believe it," said Mr. Obama, in a speech to some 5,000 soldiers in camouflage fatigues.

"Here's the truth," he said. "Our alliances have never been stronger. We're leading on behalf of freedom, including standing with the people of Libya that are finally free from Muammar Qaddafi."

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(CBS News) Surveying the flood damage produced by Hurricane Isaac, newly minted Republican nominee Mitt Romney on Friday told Gov. Bobby Jindal that he had come to Louisiana to learn -- and then asked where all the water came from.

Meeting with Jindal in the flooded Lafitte area of Jefferson Parish, Romney said, "I appreciate the chance to be here. I have a lot of questions for you. I'm here to learn and obviously to draw some attention to what's going here, so that people around the country know that people done here need help."

Jindal lauded the contributions of the Red Cross, Salvation Army and other organizations amid a scene of downed trees, high water and National Guard troops. Romney expressed concern about the welfare of the 5,000 residents, some of whom had evacuated. He then asked, according to a journalists' pool report of the visit: "Did the water come from the sky, or the rivers, or the ocean?"

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(CBS News) At the height of the tightly-scripted Republican National Convention, actor Clint Eastwood on Thursday made a "surprise" appearance, delivering a sometimes humorous, other times scathing speech - a convention moment that was ad-libbed, according to the Romney campaign.

Eastwood, who was reported to be the night's "mystery guest" earlier in the day, mocked President Obama, hitting the president on, among other things, the country's unemployment problem, Afghanistan and being a lawyer.

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