ST. PAUL—Speaking last night via satellite, President Bush was received warmly by the Republican National Convention crowd here at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center. But the two speakers who followed him, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson and Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, did not even mention Bush’s name—not once. Indeed, neither Thompson nor Lieberman gave any real indication that Republicans have held the White House since 2001. Their speeches were designed to remind voters of Senator John McCain’s independent streak, his reformist credentials, and his character.

Both Thompson and Lieberman praised McCain for supporting the surge of U.S. forces in Iraq—but did not praise the president who actually authorized it. Both tried to paint McCain as the true candidate of “change.” And both appealed to anti-Washington populism. Thompson noted that McCain has “led battle after battle to change the acrimonious, pork-barreling, self-serving ways of Washington,” and said that a McCain-Palin administration would “drain that swamp.” Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent who still caucuses with Senate Democrats, called McCain “a restless reformer who will clean up Washington and get our government working again for all of the American people.”

Thompson and Lieberman did not even mention Bush’s name—not once.

Of course, Republicans have controlled the presidency for the past eight years, and for a majority of that time they have controlled both houses of Congress. Now, in a presidential campaign defined by the perceived need for change, they must find a way to overcome their party’s badly bruised public image. They must also overcome George W. Bush’s unpopularity with the broader electorate without alienating the many GOP voters who still admire him. Thompson and Lieberman chose simply to ignore Bush.

However, the former served up plenty of red meat. Thompson called Senator Barack Obama “the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee to ever run for president” and blasted the “Democrat-controlled Congress” as “the least accomplished and most unpopular Congress in our nation’s history.” He said that the Democrats would respond to America’s challenges “with protectionism, higher taxes, and an even bigger bureaucracy,” and warned that the Supreme Court “could be lost to liberalism for a generation.”

But the bulk of the speech focused on McCain’s life story, and especially on his service in Vietnam. The arena was remarkably quiet as Thompson described the beatings and other hardships that McCain endured in the Hanoi Hilton. The point was to emphasize that McCain possesses “the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of our history have sought in their leaders—strength, courage, humility, wisdom, duty, honor.” In an obvious jab at Obama, Thompson said of McCain: “It’s pretty clear there are two questions we’ll never have to ask ourselves: ‘Who is this man?’ and ‘Can we trust this man with the presidency?’”

Lieberman’s speech was less energetic and crowd-pleasing, but it had similar objectives: to portray McCain as a bold reformer, and to underscore his feisty independence from normal partisan politics. Lieberman urged “my fellow Democrats and independents” to “vote for the person you believe is best for the country, not for the party you happen to belong to.” He got only tepid applause when he observed that McCain had “led the fight” on immigration reform and global warming. He got much louder cheers when he said that “if John McCain is just another partisan Republican, then I’m Michael Moore’s favorite Democrat.”

It is most unusual, as Lieberman acknowledged, to hear Bill Clinton praised at a GOP convention. But Lieberman compared Clinton favorably with Obama, insisting that, unlike Obama, the 42nd president was willing to defy various “Democratic interest groups” if necessary. Clinton “worked with Republicans, and got some important things done,” Lieberman said, citing “welfare reform, free trade agreements, and a balanced budget.” During his brief Senate tenure, Obama “has not reached across party lines to accomplish anything significant, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party to get something done. And I just ask you to contrast that with John McCain’s record of independence and bipartisanship.”

While Lieberman explicitly contrasted McCain with Obama, he implicitly contrasted McCain with Bush, hoping to make the Arizona senator seem more palatable to Democratic and independent voters. “This is no ordinary election,” Lieberman said. And this is no ordinary Republican convention. When two primetime speakers fail to mention the party’s sitting two-term president, it shows just how eager they are to distinguish him from the current GOP nominee.

Duncan Currie is managing editor of THE AMERICAN.

Images by Getty/Dianna Ingram.