by Chris Lehmann

Last week President George W. Bush hosted an informal sit-down in the Oval Office with a select audience of friendly conservative journalists. He showcased some more of his reading habits (not just Camus and Shakespeare, he assured them), letting slip that he had recently read three -- three!-- biographies of George Washington, without doubt the dullest of our Founding Fathers. And then there was a spiritual moment, as reported by one of the faithful scribes in attendance, the National Review's editor Rich Lowry. Bush denounced skeptics of his zeal to export "freedom" as apostles of "moral relativism." And he announced his belief that the nation is in the midst of a profound cultural shift: "I'm not giving you a definitive statement," the president cautioned. "But it seems like to me there's a Third Awakening with a cultural change . . . . It feels like it. I'm just giving you a reference point, if this is something you're interested in looking at . . . . I don't have many people coming on the rope line saying, 'I'd like a new bridge' or 'How about some more highway money.' They're coming to say, 'I'm coming to tell you Mr. President, I'm praying for you.' It's pretty remarkable."

That it is -- though not so much for the reasons Bush thinks. After all, many Bush supporters have plenty of worldly, highway-bill style reasons to pray for their man, who remains mired in the 40-percent approval range despite a frantic effort to rebrand the Iraqi Freedom cause yet again amid the commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks.

No, what's remarkable here is the president's casual recourse to the language of American awakenings, those mass waves of soul-searching--and not incidentally, political reform -- that shaped much of the history of Protestant America. The first Great Awakening occurred under the guidance of British preacher George Whitfield in the mid-18th century; it's widely credited with helping forge a national consciousness in the American colonies that led, in turn, to the onset of the American Revolution. Nearly 100 years later, the Second Great Awakening, under the direction of the great Methodist revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, spurred the wave of reformist agitation that midwifed abolitionistm, Mormonism, and first-wave feminism, among other movements.

There was also, it turns out, an actual Third Great Awakening -- the so-called Business Man's revival of urban charity and uplift on the eve of the Civil War. But, if by Bush's reckoning, American culture is convulsing itself into yet another awakening, what would its character be -- and what broader social changes might it portend? For one thing, says John Corrigan, who wrote Business of the Heart, a cultural history of the original Third Great Awakening -- our religious scene is far too fragmented and diverse to sustain a national awakening. "Sure, among certain people, there's a stronger rhetoric being deployed, some more churchgoing," he says. But the idea of a great awakening "doesn't make much sense" in an America that is far from universally Protestant. The appeal of an awakening in the context of the present, Corrigan says, is a backward-looking one: "It calls to mind all sorts of pleasant images, if you're an American Christian -- about the country's destiny, and about the hand of God in the affairs of men."

But that's the rub, Corrigan points out: In theological terms, awakenings are about the conviction of sin, where the hand of God is on the verge of damning your sorry, vicious, pleasure-loving soul. "There's always a guilt in some part of an American population that plays into an awakening, a revival or a reform movement," he says.

That sense of guilt isn't exactly at a premium in the Bush White House -- Camus and Shakespeare notwithstanding. "One of the interesting things to me about this, is you have a president who has such terrible difficulty to admit wrong, but who is also so quick to claim a kind of moral authority under an awakening," Corrigan says. "Awakenings are about people admitting wrongs, and creating a future that's better. It's so ironic to me that a president would be using the idea of an awakening to keep from admitting mistakes."

Perhaps instead of trumpeting a new awakening, the president should go back to consult the first one. In his 1742 eyewitness account, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival or Religion in New England, the great Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards famously wrote, "Nothing sets a person so much out of the devil's reach as humility."

Chris Lehmann (lehmannchris@mac.com) is an editor at CQ Weekly and covers Washington for the New York Observer. His wife is Ana Marie Cox but don't hold that against him.

Elsewhere on the web: A Marine write home about Fallujah's "small community" of midgets and other scenes of daily life in Iraq. Obama gets a B+ in Iowa while McCain finally remembers to add another Secretary of State to the list of those supporting his position on detainee abuse: "By the way, I forgot to mention this: George Shultz said I could say that he strongly favors our position." You could see how it'd slip his mind.

By Mike Madden

Maybe all politics isn't local after all.

In the middle of the election-crazed capital in a crazy election season, one contest close to home passed relatively quietly in official Washington this week while political junkies focused on key races in Rhode Island, Maryland and Arizona.

D.C. Democrats all but guaranteed that the young Blackberry-wielding, triathalon-running Councilman Adrian Fenty would win election as mayor in November, by nominating him Tuesday night as the party's candidate in a city that went 89 percent for John Kerry in 2004. This isn't your standard primary, where only the most motivated voters come out to the polls; it's the only election that matters.

But turnout Tuesday was lower than expected, despite the interest and a "watershed" opportunity created by Mayor Anthony Williams stepping down after eight years on the job. Just over 32 percent of D.C. voters bothered to show up at polling places Tuesday. And unlike in neighboring, affluent Montgomery County, Md., where a series of screwups left voters writing their choices down on blank paper for officials to collect and count later, there were no long lines or busted machines keeping people away. Preliminary statistics show overall turnout in D.C. was actually lower this year than in 2002, when the incumbent Williams ran without serious opposition and had to organize a write-in campaign after he failed to produce enough nominating petitions to get on the ballot ahead of time.

That might not be surprising in some places, but this is Washington, D.C., where wags have even figured out a way to turn the beloved Redskins into a tool for predicting presidential elections (if they lose their last home game before Election Day, that's a bad sign for the party in power -- so with the GOP extra-nervous this year, expect Republicans to be Dallas Cowboys fans on Nov. 5 even though it's only a mid-term). Both the mayor's race and the campaign for DC Council chair featured multiple contenders for open seats, and candidates dumped enough money on TV ads and mailers that few could argue they didn't know the election was happening.

With a population of 550,000, most of the city's residents have nothing to do with the business of campaigns and elections, but there are still more than enough Hill staffers, ambitious young administration officials, lobbyists, thinktank workers and political reporters living here because of their devotion to civic life that you'd expect turnout to be heavy. The local alternative weekly even wrote up a "Hill Staffer's Guide" for the local election. Yet the national politicos seem to have tuned it out. ABC's super-insidery blog The Note relegated the D.C. results to its second page and only linked to one piece of coverage. Even the Democratic National Committee barely mentioned Fenty's win, and this is a year when both political parties are so eager to claim momentum that they trumpet every victory with celebratory press releases. So why is all the attention heading outside the Beltway?

For one thing, Republicans - the controlling portion of the political class for years now - had almost nothing to vote for. The party didn't even have any candidates running in two statewide races and two ward elections. Only 7.7 percent of D.C. Republicans turned out Tuesday, dragging down the overall figure (Democrats saw about 35 percent turnout, while the tiny Statehood Green Party got 10 percent of its 5,000 voters out).

Also, many of the politically obsessed types who move here for work keep closer ties elsewhere than they do in Washington. Hill aides can vote in their home states – as anyone who's seen out-of-state license plates around town knows, many even keep their cars registered elsewhere, to avoid D.C.'s high car taxes and insurance rates. Fan clubs from just about city in the country gather on fall weekends at bars around town to root for their football teams, ignoring the local favorites. Career operatives who clear out every two years to work on campaigns just register to vote wherever they wind up living in November - the better to help ensure victory for the boss. For a company town, Washington is still pretty transient.

There might not be enough juice in District politics to get national buzz, even when the mayor's office is only a few blocks from the White House. The city's only federal elected office is the non-voting delegate to the House, and some of the biggest news incumbent Eleanor Holmes Norton (unchallenged by local Republicans this fall) has made in 16 years in office was when she called Stephen Colbert "vanilla" in July. The National Governors Association doesn't let D.C.'s top executive join, even though its annual meetings are held across the street from city hall. In official Washington's clout-counting hierarchy, where lobbyists can seem more glamorous than lawmakers, a municipal election without the chance to move up the ladder doesn't mean much. You just can't get very far in national politics if Washington is your base, and in official Washington, that may be what counts most.

Mike Madden (mike.madden@mac.com) covers government and politics for Gannett News Service.