Kerry's night — Nominee issues challenge

"My promise is to lead our country, to bring people together and take us to a better place," the lawmaker said in the nine-minute campaign documentary.

The video also includes the first reference from the convention podium to Kerry's emergence as a prominent anti-war activist more than three decades ago after he returned home from Vietnam.

Bush's GOP surrogates kept up their weeklong criticism of the Kerry-Edwards ticket in terms likely to recur throughout their own convention.

"Everything and anything has been discussed but their record," said former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of the Democrats, joining a string of Republicans accusing Kerry of trying to obscure a career-long record of liberalism.

The convention's final evening was as rigorously scripted, designed to flesh out Kerry's biography and emphasize his experience as a decorated veteran.

The video was part of the effort to shed Kerry's image as an aloof politician, casting him as an athlete and a musician, a Yale graduate and a prosecutor, a soldier and a son, a father and a husband.

"I cried like a baby when they were born, both of them," Kerry says of his two daughters, Vanessa and Alexandra.