Obama on Public Option: Two Steps Forward One Step Back

From Michelle Malkin, "White House Public Option Ploy: A Trial Balloon, Not a White Flag":

Do you believe the Sunday spin on the White House’s alleged “retreat” from the Obamacare public option? ....

The real Obama is a declared proponent of single-payer and universal health care Trojan Horses. All else is political theater.

From Wikipedia, on the phrase, "Two steps forward one step back":

Two steps forward one step back ..." is a catchprase reflecting on an anecdote about a frog trying to climb out of a water well; for every two steps the frog climbs, it falls back by one step, making its progress arduous.

The phrase is sometimes cynically rearranged to "One step forward, two steps back..." to reflect a situation where, seemingly for every attempt to make progress in a task, an actual retrograde performance is achieved.

The most infamous "cynical rearrangment" is Vladimir Lenin's, and his Communist Party tract, ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK (THE CRISIS IN OUR PARTY:

One step forward, two steps back. . . . It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. It would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organisation and Party discipline. We have already won a great deal, and we must go on fighting, undismayed by reverses, fighting steadfastly, scorning the philistine methods of circle wrangling, doing our very utmost to preserve the hard-won single Party tie linking all Russian Social-Democrats, and striving by dint of persistent and systematic work to give all Party members, and the workers in particular, a full and conscious understanding of the duties of Party members, of the struggle at the Second Party Congress, of all the causes and all the stages of our divergence, and of the utter disastrousness of opportunism, which, in the sphere of organisation as in the sphere of our programme and our tactics, helplessly surrenders to the bourgeois psychology, uncritically adopts the point of view of bourgeois democracy, and blunts the weapon of the class struggle of the proletariat.

In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation. Disunited by the rule of anarchic competition in the bourgeois world, ground down by forced labour for capital, constantly thrust back to the "lower depths" of utter destitution, savagery, and degeneration, the proletariat can, and inevitably will, become an invincible force only through its ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organisation, which welds millions of toilers into an army of the working class. Neither the senile rule of the Russian autocracy nor the senescent rule of international capital will be able to withstand this army. It will more and more firmly close its ranks, in spite of all zigzags and backward steps, in spite of the opportunist phrase-mongering of the Girondists of present-day Social-Democracy, in spite of the self-satisfied exaltation of the retrograde circle spirit, and in spite of the tinsel and fuss of intellectualist anarchism.

Note: This post is simply making comparisons. Barack Obama's ideological program is modeled along Leninist lines, as I have noted previously. See, "Should Revolutionaries Feel Good About Obama?"

See also, Andrew Waldron, "What Barack Obama Learned From the Communist Party."

Plus, at Memeorandum, Mark Ambinder, "Administration Official: 'Sebelius Misspoke'."

Related: Lee Cary, "The Array of WH ObamaCare Tactics Grows."