By STAR PARKER, Scripps Howard News Service

President Obama took his case for what he now calls "health insurance reform" to the faith community. He made his pitch in a phone call, also broadcast over the Internet, to clergy who called in and logged on from around the nation.

President Obama took his case for what he now calls "health insurance reform" to the faith community. He made his pitch in a phone call, also broadcast over the Internet, to clergy who called in and logged on from around the nation.

Barack Obama won the presidency under the persona of healer. He promised to unify a divided nation and said how he would do this.

He'd put ideology aside and solve problems. And he'd bring new open, bipartisan governing to Washington, devoid of special interests.

Now, six months into this presidency we have exactly the opposite.

President Obama is a clever and ambitious man. And he has surrounded himself with a clever and ambitious staff.

This bright crew understood from the outset that time would determine if they would succeed with their health care plan.

Barack Obama billed his White House beer summit Thursday to discuss the altercation between the black Harvard professor and the white policeman as a "teachable moment."

But, unfortunately, I'd doubt that the real lesson to be learned ever came up over those beers and pretzels.

"America, America, God shed His grace on thee."
Many demoralized souls felt over recent months that this famous appeal in "America the Beautiful" had been falling on deaf ears.
But we've had a miracle. The socialized medicine freight train, chugging down the track with seeming insurmountable inevitability, has been, for the moment, derailed.

What is now being billed as health care reform is but the latest chapter in a process I described in an earlier column as "Back on Uncle Sam's Plantation."
Rather than moving dysfunctional America off the welfare state, as we did with welfare reform in 1996, we are now moving the free, functioning, and once prosperous part of our nation onto the welfare state.

The Democrats' health care initiative reminds me of the joke about the Boy Scout fighting on a street corner with an old lady.
When a passerby asked what was going on, the scout said, "I'm trying to help her across the street but she refuses to go."

President Obama wants health care reform this year.
He said at a town hall meeting the other day that he won't tolerate "endless delay" and that we probably won't reform health care if we don't do it this year.
Now why is that Mr. President? Will Congress be on vacation for the remaining three years of your term?

An incensed Andrew Sullivan -- homosexual journalist and activist -- told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper the other night that Barack Obama is ducking the "core civil rights challenge of his time."
For once, I find myself on the same page with Sullivan.
But he and I have very different ideas about what that "core civil rights challenge" is.