'You Lie' Fallout: Foe Hauls in Quick Half-Million

Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst at President Obama turned him instantly into a stand-in for conservatives who also want to yell -- and a rainmaker for Democrats who want the congressman out of office.

"You lie!" Wilson, R-S.C., bellowed during the president's Wednesday night speech to a joint session of Congress.

Supporters flocked to the social networking site Facebook.com on Thursday to cheer Wilson on. "Thank you Joe. Retract your apology! Obama is a LIAR!" declared a woman on one of the message boards.

The campaign of Rob Miller, the Democrat running against Wilson in 2010, got a six-figure surge of support -- more than $500,000 with money still coming in.

Other political groups tried to piggyback on anti-Wilson sentiment.

Jon Vogel, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, sent an e-mail to supporters asking for help raising $100,000 in the next 48 hours "to send a message to Republicans like Congressman Joe Wilson that we will not stand for our President to be called a liar in front of the nation."

In an overture for their latest petition drive, the liberal activist group MoveOn.org asked for signatures in support of "real health care reform" because "We can't afford to let right-wing extremists like Joe Wilson hold health care reform hostage."

At The Ballot Box Miller has a far from easy task as he tries to make the most of the moment and turn it into 14 months of momentum in a district that prefers to elect Republicans.

"I don't think it's a silver bullet, but it cracks the veneer," said Thomas Mills, a Democratic political consultant based in North Carolina. "And now [the Miller campaign's] job is to exploit it and keep it alive."

"It will be up to us and to Rob Miller to keep reminding people that Congressman Wilson, by doing that, appealed to the lowest part of his base -- the people who are ignorant and ill-mannered and disrespectful of the president," said Carol Fowler, who heads the Democratic Party in South Carolina.

After giving Republican George W. Bush 20 percentage-point victories in the 2000 and 2004 presidential races, GOP nominee John McCain won by nine points in 2008, while on the same ballot, Wilson won 53.7 percent of the vote against Miller.

In that race, the challenger was outspent 2-to-1, so the nest egg created by the heckling episode could make a difference in the decisions Wilson's rival makes as he prepares to face the smaller pool of voters who show up in non-presidential years.

Takes More Than Money In the 2008 campaign cycle, another House race showed that a big cash infusion doesn't necessarily turn a race's outcome.

The Democrat challenging Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann got a $1 million windfall when donors across the country reacted to the Republican's suggestion that anti-American sentiment in Congress be investigated. Yet Bachmann defeated candidate El Tinklenberg, 46 percent to 43 percent.

Bachmann's comments came less than three weeks before election day. Wilson has more than a year to figure out how to deal with the extra brickbats from the left and accolades from the right.

The Raleigh, N.C.-based Americans for Legal Immigration PAC put out a release Thursday in support of Wilson's stand.

Wilson's challenge could be figuring out how to stand by both his apology to the White House and the underlying sentiment that moved him to speak out.

Republicans predict that the negative side of the uproar will die down well before next November's election. They don't expect their opposition will be able to portray the heckling as evidence that Wilson is unsuitable for his office.

"Joe's a very likable, warm individual who has never lacked for commitment ... or fervency, but no one would ever call him boorish in any way," said South Carolina GOP political consultant Hollis "Chip" Felkel.

Even Fowler conceded she "had not ever seen that pattern" from Wilson before.

What matters in the end, though, is what the voters think in November 2010.

"The people who think he was a hero were already going to vote for him, anyhow," said Mills. From a strategic point of view, he said, what matters are the sentiments of "the people who aren't paying that much attention" -- or who weren't until this week.

CQ Politics rates the general election race "Leans Republican."