Report: Mitch Daniels 'Would Like to Run' for Prez, Just Waiting on Wife's OK

Jon Ward of The Huffington Post has the story:

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels wants to run for president and is not in the process of convincing himself to do it, a close adviser said. The last hurdle remaining is ongoing discussions between him and his wife, Cheri Daniels, over whether she is ready to face questions about their past.

“I think he would like to do it,” the Daniels adviser told The Huffington Post by phone. “I actually think he’d have a decent chance of getting the nomination.”

The issue that Daniels and his wife are discussing has to do with their familial past:

The confirmation that the Daniels’ marriage is the last hurdle in front of a bid for the White House highlights the delicate situation in which the Governor finds himself.

In 1993, Cheri Daniels left her husband with their four daughters and married another man in California. She returned a few years later, reconciled with Daniels, and the two were remarried in 1997. That is, in a nutshell, the story. The national press first picked up on it last year when it was buried at the bottom of an 8,600-word Weekly Standard profile.

But much is unknown. Why did she leave Daniels? Why did she come back? That she would be reluctant to publicly answer such delicate questions in front of the nation seems only natural.

A senior Republican official who worked in the Reagan White House said that “quite understandably, that’s a difficult chapter in your life, and whether you’d want to talk about that, if only for a few times, it’d be something you’d have to talk about.”

For more on Daniels, check out this profile of him from The Weekly Standard, where he said that the next Republican president will have to call a truce on the social issues.

HT Hot Air.