What's the matter with South Carolina?

Dawson agreed, citing the state's long and tempestuous political history as a mark of pride: "South Carolina's been yelling from the top of our lungs on national politics since this nation was formed and entered the union."

Obama himself is no stranger to the state's hothouse political culture—one of his favorite stories from the campaign trail, which he retold as recently as Monday, took place at a campaign stop in Greenwood, South Carolina. There, a city council member introduced one of the campaign's most famous slogans when she warmed up Obama's crowd with a feisty chant of "Fired up! Ready to go!"

But even if swaggering politicians and impassioned oratory aren't entirely new to South Carolina, some Democrats say there's a newly harsh tone to public debate there. As the temperature of the conservative base has heated up, so too has the pressure on GOP politicians to become more vocal in their criticism of the president—and they've amped up their rhetoric accordingly.

"South Carolina has always had a reputation of being polite and courteous," said former Democratic Gov. Richard Riley, who served as education secretary in the Clinton administration. "In the past, we've always had a very aggressive, conservative group in South Carolina, but to my knowledge it had always been, basically, polite."

Members of both parties have expressed dismay at the kind of attention Wilson's comment brought to South Carolina - a new embarrassment, some said, on top of an already distressing summer, thanks to the sex scandal that extinguished Sanford's rising star. The state GOP's increasingly caustic tone, some Democrats said, was particularly troubling due to South Carolina's troubled racial history.

"The Republican Party in South Carolina is well steeped in the dark arts of racial politics and I think that Obama's election is particularly galling to some in that party," said Phil Noble, head of the South Carolina New Democrats, an independent reform group. "There are many in that party for whom simply the idea, much less the reality, of a black president is very painful."

Yet there’s evidence that it's not simply Obama who is the target of fired-up South Carolina conservatives. And their frustration isn't even limited to Democrats. Rep. Bob Inglis, a Republican from the Greenville-Spartanburg region, is finding out the hard way that his once-reliably conservative voting record doesn’t grant him immunity from the state's hunger for red-meat politicking.

Inglis has jeopardized his political fortunes by bucking the party line recently on issues ranging from climate change to Iraq to the Pledge of Allegiance. In August, when Inglis told a town hall audience to "turn that television off" when popular conservative talk show host Glenn Beck appears on the screen, the crowd erupted in fury. He is currently facing a crowded GOP primary field in 2010.

Haynes, a former chief of staff to Inglis, suggested that the president's chief South Carolina critics may be responding, in part, to the kind of pressure officeholders like Inglis are feeling back home.

"People have always thought of Joe Wilson as a good, party-line, thoughtful guy. These are not guys who have been thought of as bomb-throwers," he said. "They're conservative, all stretch of the imagination, but they're not anybody who has a long history of grabbing headlines, saying and doing outrageous things."

For now, it remains an open question whether this trend toward the sensational will prove to be a recipe for spinning conservative gold or for producing political poison that turns off Democrats, independents and the state's rapidly-growing population of transplants from other, less conservative regions.

"There is an angst out there and there is a climate of fear right now," Dawson said. "That confusion and chaos creates opportunity."