It’s a conundrum, all right. A confusion. A paradox.

Kevin Drum, with today’s “Chart of the Day:”

That’s public support for a “public option,” according to various polls.

But wait! Drum writes:

In case you missed it, Jon Stewart had a good riff on this last night. His question: Why are Democrats so lame? It’s a good one! They have a huge majority in the Senate, the public is strongly in favor of a public option, and yet….for some reason they can’t round up the votes to pass it. Hell, they can’t even round up a normal majority to pass it out of the Finance Committee, let alone a supermajority to overcome an eventual filibuster.

Huh. Good point. Could it be that public support for the “public option” isn’t quite as strong as the polls suggest? Maybe when you tell people how much it’ll add to the deficit, or how many employers will drop their own insurance, or how a very similar program “worked” in Massachusetts?

Or could it be that congressional Democrats, having been forced to actually look at the issue, realize that it’s a really bad idea?

It has to be something like that, or we’ve uncovered an actual paradox: liberal Democrat career politicians purposely giving up on a slam dunk victory.

Via Memeorandum.