jobs overseas and promised to expand health care, improve education and 'fight a smarter, more effective war' against terror.

'In these dangerous days there is a right way and a wrong way to be strong,' he said.

'Strength is more than tough words,' Kerry added in a slap at Bush without mentioning the commander in chief by name.

'I will immediately reform the intelligence system so policy is guided by facts, and facts are never distorted by politics,' he said in reference to claims that the president relied on faulty intelligence in deciding to invade Iraq in 2003.

'And as president, I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: The United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to,' Kerry said.

Kerry voted in October 2002 to give Bush the authority to use military force to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, but later voted against legislation providing $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan.

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.