Last week, President Barack Obama tried to change the message on the healthcare debate. As the American public has grown more skeptical of the President’s agenda, Obama’s team has tried to retake the initiative in the media and part of that was Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress. However, during Obama’s speech when he said that illegal immigrants would not receive coverage in his healthcare plan he was interrupted with a shout of “You lie!” by Joe Wilson, a Republican representative from South Carolina. For anyone who has not seen the video, it is worth a look just to see Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s facial expression after the incident.
Wilson’s remarks started a political firestorm. Some have argued that his actions demonstrate everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. Others have argued that there must be something bad in the water in South Carolina, where Republican Governor Mark Sanford is trying to fight off impeachment by January. Then there are those who believe Wilson did the right thing in standing up to Obama and calling him to task for a lack of enforcement mechanisms in healthcare legislation to keep illegal immigrants from getting coverage.
Considering that healthcare is a central tenet of Barack Obama’s domestic agenda and that the Republican Party is hoping to regain control of the House in 2010, it is important that we look at the Joe Wilson incident this week. To do so, this brief will break down the incident in two ways. First, we will look at the issue that raised Wilson’s ire: the coverage of illegal immigrants in the healthcare legislation before Congress. And second, we will look at the political fallout from Wilson’s outburst and if it works more in favor of Democrats or Republicans.