Yesterday President Obama made a conference call to 1,000 rabbis “to pitch his health care plans in order to shore up flagging Congressional support, hoping to influence their High Holiday sermons,” Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet blogs.

Politico’s Ben Smith, using material from the Twitter postings of  several rabbis who were in on the call, tells us what Obama actually said. Smith also points out that Obama’s efforts to gin up religious support for his health proposals: “.freights health care reform with a great deal of religious meaning, and veers into the blend of policy and faith that outraged liberals in the last administration.”

More from Smith:

“We are God’s partners in matters of life and death,” Obama said, according to [Rabbi Jack] Moline (paging Sarah Palin…), quoting from the Rosh Hashanah prayer that says that in the holiday period, it is decided “who shall live and who shall die.”

Well! If we’re “God’s partners” in deciding who lives and who dies, one name for the meeting where we get together with God to make those decisions might be “death panel.”

Also–I thought we elected Obama to be the Messiah! This sounds like taking it a step further–that we actually elected him to be God.  I call that resume-padding.

And what if George W. Bush had started talking about being “partners with God”–sort of like the way he said Jesus was his favorite philosopher? And what if Bush had held a conference call with 1,000 evangelical clergymen, hoping they’d work an endorsement of one of his programs into their sermons?

Just asking.