We had received a copy of Rep. Charles Taylor’s response to being singled out by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for a few ethical issues a few days prior to the official announcement by Swain County native Heath Shuler that he was going to challenge the eight-term incumbent. Perhaps it was that juxtaposition — the embattled, career politician Taylor, a Republican from Brevard, now going up against the fresh-faced, inexperienced Shuler that made that response by Taylor suddenly seem so, well, condescending.

The wording of Taylor’s statement was so overloaded with inside-the-beltway, meaningless rhetoric that it could have come out of the notebook of some eighth-grader trying to write a civics essay titled “The major evade the issue tactics of the national Republican Party in 2005.”

In truth, it’s almost embarrassing that a man who is obviously bright — witness his success in Washington and in business — would try to pass this off on his constituents.

The national Democratic Party has targeted six congressmen in what apparently will be an early round of advertising buys. The goal, it seems, is to hammer home the ethical problems of these candidates in an attempt to soften them up despite the fact that the November 2006 election is still 16 months away. North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Meek came to Haywood County in early July to announce the party’s intentions, and held a press conference on the same day full-page ads questioning Taylor’s ethics appeared in at least three Western North Carolina newspapers — The Hendersonville Times News, The Mountaineer and The Smoky Mountain News.

At the press conference, Meek charged that Taylor has “personally profited for years from illegal and questionable business practices.” Though Taylor has been often attacked for his business dealings, this may be the first time a Democratic official has attached the word “illegal” to the attack. The whole gist of the ad campaign, it seems will be to paint Taylor as a corrupt businessman-politician who has used his position for personal gain and to thwart investigations into his deal-making.

So, like every newspaper should, we gave Taylor the opportunity to respond to this attack. Instead of defending his decision to buy a bank in Russia and providing constituents the details, instead of promising once and for all that he did not know anything about the loans that landed his bank president and a political crony in court, Taylor dropped this load: “So why do Washington liberals attack Charles Taylor? Because they support gay marriage; he does not. They support partial-birth abortion; he does not. They pushed Clinton’s NAFTA and Taylor voted against it. They reject private property rights, but Taylor supports the Fifth Amendment. They vote against the right to keep and bear arms; Taylor thinks that the Second Amendment and the Constitution itself are non-negotiable. They support wasting tax dollars on projects like Ted Kennedy’s .....”

Huh? Is there an answer in that? It is simply more of the politics of division, pushing hot-button issues and ignoring the actual question at hand. Take any one of those charges — NAFTA, for instance, which Republicans overwhelmingly supported and Democrats in Congress voted against — and Taylor has distorted the truth or simply brought up an issue that just isn’t relevant. To actually send something like that out to media outlets says one of two things, neither providing much comfort: one, our congressman really believes there is a link between questioning his ethics and, oh, partial-birth abortion; or two, he doesn’t think his constituents realize that these answers are so evasive and divisive as to be insulting.

How strong is Taylor?

A fellow WNC journalist was promising me last week that Taylor has an iron grip on his seat. Just this week another well-connected Democrat who knows mountain politics well offered to take a $50 bet that Shuler won’t win. Talk to politicos in Western North Carolina and inevitably you hear the same thing — unless some skeleton turns up to land Taylor in legal trouble, he’ll keep the 11th District seat as long as he wants.

One curiosity in those assurances, though, is that even many Taylor fans admit that some white-collar criminal charge could land him in court at almost any time, a sort of backdoor acknowledgement that he may be a bit corrupt but smart enough to stay just out of harm’s way.

But despite his long tenure in office, some are pointing out that our congressman may not be as invulnerable as some are saying. In 2004, riding the coattails of an incumbent president and his own long tenure in Congress, Taylor was one of the 14 GOP congressmen — out of 231 Republicans who won their seat — who garnered less than 55 percent of the vote. His opponent Patsy Keever started the race with name recognition only in Buncombe County. Despite that, she made a respectable showing and at least made Taylor get out and work. Shuler starts out with instant name recognition in the far western counties where Taylor has dominated, and he will almost certainly take Buncombe County because of Asheville’s liberal voters.

UNC-Charlotte political science professor Ted Arrington told a reporter that Shuler has a chance: “The district is not hopelessly Republican, from the perspective of the Democrats. But he’s got to have enough money to tell people, ‘I’m not a pinko liberal, I’m a jock.’ ... I don’t know whether the Democrats are willing to give him that kind of money.”

For his part, Shuler is beginning to appear at Democratic precinct meetings and is expected to spend some of his own money. He apparently has invested his football money well and now owns a large real estate company that he runs with his brother. Waynesville is home.

And Shuler may find it easy to combat the liberal label. While in Tennessee in 2001, Republicans there tried to convince him to make a congressional run for their party. “I was flattered,” Shuler told an interviewer.

At the very least, Shuler will hopefully convince Taylor to be more responsive and open to the voters who have shown confidence in him over the last decade and a half. At the very least, the broad brush Taylor likes to use against all opponents — like that found in the wording used in his response to the ethics charges — probably won’t work against Shuler. He may have to actually campaign on the issues, something that hasn’t happened in this congressional district in quite some time

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com.)