Rich, I’m not looking to rehash the defining “death panels” debate. People can make of the back and forth what they will. And let me add another preliminary, I’m always mindful that one can get trapped in his own experience: Proving a legal case (my experience) is very different from conducting a political campaign, so I may well be overstating what one can teach us about the other. But all that said, what you always agonize over in trying a mega-trial are the right themes: the two or three issues that can grab people by the throat, get them intensely interested, and give them a prism for analyzing all the sprawling complexity of the case. If you don’t seize on the right notes, the jury can get intimidated and overwhelmed; if you hit the right ones, they feel like they can move through the voluminous evidence — even if it involves specialized topics that are out of the layman’s ken — and get the big picture.

There’s a possibility, I agree, that the outsized importance of the “death panel” controversy and the “government option” gambit could blow up on us. If the Dems strip out these items and, along with their media friends, pretend that this means all the objectionable stuff has been addressed, then maybe the public ire subsides and they end up getting most of this abomination enacted.

But I don’t think that’s how this is trending. Raising these issues hit the right notes: They gave people a prism for understanding the big picture of Obamacare, for thinking about individual freedom, sovereignty over your own body, euthanasia, governmental incompetence, health care as a matter of private property and choice not communal property and rationing, etc. They got people thinking about a lot more than death panels and government options. They got people more invested in defeating this monstrosity and — especially as ordinary citizens find that they are often more informed than lawmakers about what’s in the proposal — they made it less likely that people will be intimidated by the complexity and the purported expertise of Democrats. Nothing is certain, but in the end I think it’s a net positive — maybe a big one.