With wife Tipper and Joseph and Hadassah Lieberman at his side, Gore arrived in the host state of the Democratic National Convention and presented himself to a crowd of hundreds waiting in the smothering heat of a hangar at Burbank's Mercury Air Center.

"We're the new guard and we're going to bring positive change to the United States of America," Gore said, Air Force Two parked at his back.

"The future starts in California. The victory starts in California," he declared.

Lieberman, the vice presidential nominee-in-waiting who arrived late Monday and was speaking to the convention Wednesday night, called out that he'd been waiting for days to use this line: "Will you help me win one for the Tipper?"

Having worked on the plane to polish his Thursday acceptance speech, Gore told the crowd, which was filled out by members of the Screen Actors Guild, that they could expect a chock-full accounting of his plans for school improvements, a patients' bill of rights, a hate crimes law, a Medicare prescription drug benefit, stricter gun controls, environmental protections and more.

His proposed Social Security reforms and $500-billion package of tax cuts -- for education, long-term health care, retirement, research and development, and other aims -- were to form the centerpiece of the speech.

Gore spoke about the speech as he flew here from Detroit.

"This is a speech I have written. I will deserve the credit or the blame. I've been rewriting and editing and tweaking," he said.

"I hope that those who watch and listen will feel afterward that they have a clearer idea of exactly what I'm proposing to do. They'll also know how the ideas and proposals I'm making are rooted in the experiences that I've had," said Gore, who represented Tennessee in Congress for 16 years before he was elected vice president in 1992.

Earlier, he professed to be more anxious on his daughter's behalf.

Karenna Gore Schiff, 27, was delivering one of the night's nominating speeches -- meant to be a deeply personal testimonial about Gore as a dad and granddad.

"I've got more butterflies about that than my own speech," Gore said.

But his chief strategist Carter Eskew made no bones about the importance of Gore's speech on Thursday accepting the party's presidential nomination. President Clinton's understudy of 7 years is trying to introduce himself to the nation as a leader and his own man.

"This is his main chance to be the main guy," said Eskew.

After a party at Warner Brothers Studios with his homestate Tennessee delegation and Lieberman's from Connecticut, Gore was spending the rest of Wednesday polishing and practicing in the quiet of his Century City hotel suite -- far from downtown Los Angeles at the insistence of the Secret Service, which was nervous about protesters near the convention center.

Gore had already rehearsed at least parts of the speech with a TelePrompTer.

One person involved in the process described family "bull sessions" where Gore, with his laptop in front of him, would read brief sections aloud to Mrs. Gore, daughter Karenna and brother-in-law Frank Hunger, consider their feedback and type in revisions.

In his limousine and on Air Force Two, legs outstretched and feet propped on a footstool, the one-time newspaper reporter would tap away on long rides between campaign stops.

Gore has, for months, swapped outlines and ideas with top aides and supporters from Capitol Hill, organized labor and other constituency groups. But spokesman Chris Lehane said Gore did the bulk of the writing during the first week of this month -- when he was "on vacation" at the North Carolina shore waiting out the Republican National Convention.

One Gore ally said an unimpressed vice president graded GOP presidential nominee George W. Bush's acceptance speech as meatless, thus fueling Gore's intent to serve up on Thursday a full menu of proposals.

Intent on playing down the role of professional wordsmiths, Lehane described as mere "sounding boards" the team of former White House speechwriter Eli Attie, who also helped write Karenna's nominating speech; consultant Bob Shrum, who pens the flowery turns-of-phrase; and Eskew, known to be deft at lacing poison darts with sugar.