As Mitt Romney prepares to give a big foreign policy speech today and begin a five-stop trip abroad tomorrow, a new USA Today/Gallup poll finds he faces challenges in convincing Americans he is the best candidate to handle foreign affairs.

“More than half of Americans, or 52%, say Obama can better handle foreign policy concerns compared with 40% who choose the presumptive Republican nominee. The numbers are closer among registered voters, who give Obama a 4-point advantage.”

First Read notes foreign policy “is a big strength for Obama heading into the fall. Almost every poll shows that. And that’s the context for Romney’s overseas trip — for this former one-term governor to demonstrate his foreign-policy chops and put more meat on bone. So far, Romney’s foreign-policy statements have seemed more like a political strategy (to sound strong and to outflank Obama) rather a clear foreign-policy outlook.”

First Read on President Obama’s latest ad:

“This is the kind of TV ad you’d expect to see at the end of a campaign or the beginning. So why now? One obvious explanation is that the race has become negative, and this ad is an effort to seize a higher ground and maybe repair the collateral damage from his own negative ads. Another explanation is that the TV ad market in battleground states has become SO saturated that this is an attempt — by having the president speak directly to the camera in a 60-second spot — to break through the clutter.”

A new RNC video blasts President Obama’s economic record using his own words, such as “the private sector is doing fine” and “you didn’t build that.”

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The New York Times reports that one of the lasting legacies of Sen. George McGovern’s (D-SD) choice of Sen. Thomas Eagleton (D-MO) as his vice presidential running mate in 1972 — without knowing that he had been hospitalized for mental health issues — “is the microscopic examination of the lives and records of potential vice-presidential candidates, a ritual involving teams of lawyers and consultants and reams of medical and financial records that the candidates are obligated to produce.”

“McGovern, who had pledged to ‘avoid the messy way vice presidents had been picked in the past,’ chose Mr. Eagleton after considering him for less than an hour. The conversation in which Mr. McGovern offered Mr. Eagleton the nomination lasted precisely 67 seconds, and there was no mention of Mr. Eagleton’s three hospitalizations for depression or the electroshock therapy during two of the stays.”

“Eighteen days later, Mr. Eagleton was forced to resign from the ticket in a debacle that culminated with Mr. McGovern’s enduring the worst defeat in presidential history.”

A new Marist poll finds 78% of Americans say they are “frustrated” by the tone of political campaigns and 74% believe that the tone of political campaigns has “gotten more negative” than in past election years.

In addition, 66% believe candidates spend more time criticizing their opponents than addressing the issues, while almost as many (64%) say negative campaign ads “harm the political process” either “a great deal” or “a significant amount.”

And by a nearly 20 point margin (56% to 37%), the public says the tone of political campaigns is “mostly uncivil and disrespectful.”

In a Mitt Romney ad last week, a stern Jack Gilchrist of Gilchrist Metal Fabricating tells President Obama that his family — and not the government — built his company.

But John DiStaso reports Gilchrist “did receive some government help for his business” in 1999 when the company received $800,000 in tax-exempt revenue bonds “to set up a second manufacturing plant and purchase equipment to produce high definition television broadcasting equipment.”

In addition, Gilchrist Metal received a U.S. Small Business Administration loan of around $500,000 in the 1980s and has received several sub-contracts from the U.S. Navy.

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“Even if you lose running for office you actually win, because you get tons of free PR.”

— Rhode Island U.S. Senate candidate Barry Hinckley (R), quoted by WPRI-TV, giving a motivational speech in 2009.

The latest Obama campaign ad makes clear the president wants the presidential election to be a choice and not a referendum on his first term.

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John Heilemann: “The depth to which Romney has dug in his heels has naturally provoked a welter of speculation about what in God’s name is in the returns — and just how bad it could be. That the levels of income will be stratospherically (some would say obscenely) high is taken as a given. That there are some years in which Romney paid an extremely low effective tax rate — lower, maybe much lower, than the 13.9 percent rate he paid in 2010 — is quite likely. And then there is the most problematic possibility: that the Swiss and Cayman accounts that we already know about are just the tip of an iceberg, one that would suggest an aggressive, arguably unpatriotic pattern of tax-avoidance.”

“My own guess, however, is that apart from one or more of these elements, what the Romney tax returns would lay bare is the extent of his donations to his church. In this case and all others, charitable donations are something to be proud of, an entirely honorable thing. But for a candidate who has taken extravagant pains to avoid discussion of his supremely prominent role in contemporary Mormonism, the idea of a wave of news stories detailing the tens of millions of dollars that he has given to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — surely making him among its most generous funders in the modern era — must be a kind of nightmare”

Despite concerted attacks on his business record, a new USA Today/Gallup poll finds Mitt Romney scores a significant advantage over President Obama when it comes to managing the economy.

In fact, by a 63% to 29% margin, those surveyed say Romney’s background in business “would cause him to make good decisions, not bad ones, in dealing with the nation’s economic problems over the next four years.”

Also interesting: “Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are much more enthusiastic about the election, an important factor in persuading supporters to vote. By 18 points, 51%-33%, they report being more enthusiastic than usual about voting. In contrast, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents by 4 points say they are less enthusiastic than usual, 43%-39%.”

“I’ll tell you the truth: He’s not that smart. He’s not that good. But he’s flippant, so I give him credit for that.”

— New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), quoted by the Baltimore Sun, on being compared to Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D).