Here’s a prediction: The so-called values voters won’t care that much about the admittedly unusual marriage of Mitch and Cheri Daniels, regarding it, if anything, as a sign of Governor Daniels’ stalwart character. The sophisticates in the mainstream media, on the other hand, won’t be able to get enough of the story. Moreover, they will attempt to cloak their prurient interrest by claiming that the marriage is a huge issue for the aforementioned values voters.
To quote from the Washington Post:
The couple has a complicated personal history. They divorced in 1994, and Cheri Daniels moved to California, where she remarried. The future governor, then a senior executive at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, raised the couple’s four daughters, who at the time spanned the ages of 8 to 14. Cheri Daniels later returned, and the couple remarried in 1997.
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal comments:
The Post spends a long but inconclusive paragraph trying to explain why this would matter, noting that “officials at potential rival campaigns to Daniels disagreed about whether the personal history of Cheri Daniels would ever be a vulnerability or even germane to the race.”
The Post quoted Cheri Daniels saying in 2004, “If you like happy endings, you’ll love our story. Love and the love of children overcame any problems.”
Taranto:
“The love of children” certainly speaks well of the governor’s maturity and leadership. Perhaps that will prove sufficient to assuage whatever doubts voters have about the story. The Times adds that “it is a topic that Mr. Daniels does not relish delving into,” and we must admit the past few years have made a reluctance to talk about oneself into a very attractive quality in a president.
I do believe that what kind of marriage a candidate has is a factor, though probably not so much a one as, say, taxes: it just goes into the mix. If it tells you something about the candidate’s character, and it usually does, then factor it in, along with the candidate’s position on the debt ceiling. But I have to say that I find it very appealing that Mitch and Cheri Daniels got back together. It sounds so…adult, and I’m looking for an adult after four years of a peevish adolescent.