Campaign Outsider

No politician’s wife is hotter than Cheri Daniels.

The significant other (twice) of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-The Missus) is widely considered the swing vote in whether Daniels (who makes myriad GOPniks starry-eyed) will run for president next year.

So Cheri’s star turn as speaker at the state’s annual GOP dinner last night was closely watched for signals about the Mister’s intentions.

From CBS News:

It was Cheri Daniels’ first-ever speech at a big political event in all the years she has been Indiana’s First Lady. And with speculation over whether her husband will enter the presidential race now at a fever-pitch, her mere presence at the podium for the annual state GOP dinner had everyone searching for clues and hidden meanings. The question was heard over and over: Did her willingness to step into the limelight after years as a reluctant First Lady mean she was on board with Daniels making a bid for the White House?

Daniels, who asked his wife to give the speech, didn’t rule it out.

“This whole business of running for national office–I’m not saying I won’t do it,” he said, triggering loud applause.

The runup to the speech featured lots of talk about the Daniels’ speedbump marriage. From Thursday’s New York Times:

While much is known about Mr. Daniels in Republican circles, where he is viewed as a fiscally focused, budget-cutting, pragmatic-thinking conservative, there is one period of his life that has remained almost entirely private — until now.

He has been married twice — to the same wife.

Should he run, that chapter in his life would no doubt be picked over in public and become a part of the personal narrative that springs up around any serious candidate: in this case a three-year gap in their marriage in the 1990s, when she filed for divorce, moved to California with a new husband and left Mr. Daniels to raise their four daughters, then ages 8 to 14. She later returned and remarried him.

He has discussed it only once publicly, telling The Indianapolis Star in 2004: “If you like happy endings, you’ll love our story. Love and the love of children overcame any problems.”

That reminded the hardworking staff of the Weekly Standard profile of Daniels the chronically readable Andrew Ferguson wrote last summer, which included this:

When the oppo researchers and the national press do get around to opening up Daniels’s life for inspection, they will find a few embarrassments. One is his arrest in 1970 for marijuana possession when he was a student at Princeton. He spent two nights in jail and paid a $350 fine, and later wrote about the bust in a column for the Star in 1989. More painfully, he and his wife Cheri divorced in 1994. She moved to California, leaving Daniels with the four daughters, aged 8 to 14, and married a doctor. She divorced again and moved back to Indiana. She and Mitch remarried in 1997.

Cheri has never spoken about this publicly, and from what I can tell it’s been mentioned in print only twice. Daniels’s only comment was to the Indianapolis Star in 2004: “If you like happy endings, you’ll love our story.”

Starting today, we’ll see how much people love it.

P.S. Ferguson’s piece also highlighted MitchTV, the video vérité series he ran on Indiana TV stations in 2004 and 2008.

Representative sample from 2004:

That approach could actually work.

If Cheri says it’s okay.