REMARRYING THE MOTHER OF YOUR KIDS IS A NEGATIVE?:

Whether Mitch Daniels runs for president may come down to his wife’s vote (Jason Horowitz, May 11, 2011, Washington Post)

The governor’s political enemies — those who are eager to box out a promising contender with a reputation for fiscal seriousness, establishment backing and intellectual heft — are taking him at his word.

A rival campaign has identified the first lady’s reticence as a pressure point before she steps fully into the limelight. 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.

In exchange for anonymity, an official for another GOP prospect provided contact information for the ex-wife of the man Cheri Daniels married, in the years between her divorce and remarriage to Daniels. Other 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. One key adviser to a potential candidate said that the guardedness the first lady had exhibited about her past signaled a lack of enthusiasm that, more than any personal baggage, would handicap her husband’s chances over time. An official at another candidate’s campaign said the marital history wouldn’t and shouldn’t matter. [...]

Other potential candidates have had to contend with more sensational marital discord.

Donald Trump has long been known for dating much younger women and then divorcing them for much younger women. Newt Gingrich, who announced his presidential bid Wednesday, left his first wife, his high school geometry teacher, for his second wife, Marianne Gingrich, whom he left for his current wife, Callista Gingrich. A front-page profile of Callista Gingrich in Tuesday’s New York Times ended with a friend’s politically palatable assessment that the “great couple” had “a nontraditional start.”

In 2008, Mitt Romney quipped that of all the Republicans in the field, only the Mormon had one wife. This time around, fellow Mormon Jon Huntsman joins him in that category. Tim Pawlenty has, if anything, sought to spice up depictions of his marriage. In an early 2010 foray into Iowa, Pawlenty opened a speech by saying, “I’m very thankful for my red-hot smoking wife, the first lady of Minnesota.”

Gov. Daniels also relies on a standard line. When discussing his divorce and remarriage to Cheri Daniels, he often remarks: “If you like happy endings, you’ll love our story.”

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