I hope that Charlie Taylor doesn't try to come back. He blew it last time, and it's time for someone who's untainted.
go for one of our own, Congressman BillyBob.
I assume that Senator Tom Apodaca is a conservative, or Congressman Patrick McHenry (perhaps the most conservative young member of Congress) would not be recruiting him to run. I agree that Charles Taylor would not be our strongest candidate to retake the seat, and a state senator from Henderson County such as Senator Apodaca sounds like the smart way to go.
BTW, if elected, Tom Apodaca would give the GOP a Mexican-American Congressman, something we haven't had since Henry Bonilla was defeated in a run-off last December:
"Apodaca, 49, said his father is Mexican and his mother is Scotch-Irish. He was born in El Paso, Texas, raised in Durham and has lived in North Carolina 38 years."
http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=256852
It tends to be Taylor's honor, but we knew he was going to have problems some time ago holding this seat. We probably need to go with someone new. I had forgotten that Taylor has been in elective office on and off since he was 25, when he got elected to the NC House back in 1966 (he apparently lost as a State Senator in the '74 Watergate debacle and didn't make a return to politics for 14 years when he ran against the incumbent Jim Clarke in '88 and then beat him in a '90 rematch). If Taylor runs again, he may be thinking that he can treat Shuler like he did Clarke, but Clarke was the old out-of-touch incumbent, and he resembles his old nemesis more these days, unfortunately.
Taylor is a greedy bastard. He just interested in using Congressional influence to enrich his business buddies. Taylor needs to be persuaded from running again.