"As I was walking on the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish, he'd go away."

With apologies to Hughes Mearns, reportedly an English student at Harvard in the 1900s when he wrote that little ditty, it's a pretty good description of the 43rd president of the United States at the Republican National Convention just ended.

Not only was George W. Bush physically absent, delivering a bland endorsement of nominee John McCain via satellite; he was essentially missing in action in nearly all the discussions of where the Republican Party and the country have been over the last eight years.

McCain himself, in a pedestrian acceptance speech delivered woodenly, mentioned Bush only at the start and not by name, nor even as "my friend," as he seems to refer to nearly everyone else. "I'm grateful to the president of the United States," he said, "for leading us in these dark days following the worst attack on American soil in our history, and keeping us safe from any attack many thought was inevitable."

That was it. The rest of the speech was a McCain exercise in dissociating himself from the man who has been running the government since 2001, and saying how he's going to change the Washington that Bush has been in charge of over all that time.

In words that painted him as an insurgent pledging to throw the rascals out, and despite his own Senate record of 90 percent or more support of Bush positions, McCain indelibly slapped the maverick label back on himself.

He paraded his surprise choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate as the anointing of a fellow maverick. The decision nevertheless caused party conservatives to rejoice, as her strong Christian evangelist and other right-wing credentials, from abortion to guns, became known to a national audience.

In comments that might have been expected from Barack Obama or Joe Biden, McCain pledged to "make this government start working for you again, and get this country back on the road to prosperity and peace." He then issued "an advance warning to the old big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second crowd: Change is coming."

He clearly had Democratic critics of Bush's war in mind regarding the last slap. But the big-spending remark fit to a T the incumbent GOP president under whom the budget surplus left to him by Democrat Bill Clinton in 2001 has mushroomed into a record national deficit.

McCain was more explicit, and again without mentioning Bush by name, in saying: "We were elected (in 2000) to change Washington, and we let Washington change us. We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when, rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger."

This last sharing the blame with the Democrats, who have had control of Congress only the last two years, by which time the budget had gone deeper in the red, conveniently whitewashed the growth of the federal government itself in the George W. Bush reign.

Poor Dubya. Even when McCain invoked the Republican icons, the man who wasn't there was left out. "We're going to recover the people's trust," he told the convention, "by standing up again to the values Americans admire. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics."

When McCain listed the changes to come, however, he spoke of "low taxes ... open markets ... a strong defense, work, faith, service, a culture of life ... government that doesn't make choices for you ... drill(ing) new wells offshore ... more nuclear power plants" — all of them already embraced or favored by the current Bush administration.

By the end, you could almost hear McCain reciting the final stanzas of the little Hughes Mearns poem:

"When I came home last night at three, the man was waiting there for me. But when I looked around the hall, I couldn't see him there at all.

"Go away, go away, don't you come back any more; Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door."


Jules Witcover's latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very Strange Bedfellows," has just been published by Public Affairs Press. Reach him at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.