Indiana first lady Cheri Daniels will be delivering the keynote address at an Indiana GOP dinner tonight. Right before she speaks, Mitch Daniels will deliver brief remarks. Neither the governor or the first lady is expected to mention 2012, according to Indiana GOP insiders.
“If Cheri is going to make any headlines tonight, that has been one of the best kept secrets in politics,” a former George W. Bush administration colleague of Mitch Daniels’s tells National Review Online.
The source adds that Daniels is still interested in a 2012 run, saying, “Given how politically astute he is, I have a hard time believing he’d be doing what he’s been doing lately if he weren’t serious about it.”
Cheri Daniels rarely speaks publicly, and there has been speculation that she is choosing to give this address to test out the kind of public life a campaign will force upon the Daniels.
The Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz reported today that an employee of a possible GOP candidate gave him anonymously the contact info for the man Cheri Daniels married in the 90’s, before returning back to Mitch Daniels a few years later.
Mitch Daniels’s spokeswoman, Jane Jankowski, told the Washington Post in response to the incident that “Governor Daniels chooses to believe that no candidate would employ such tactics, and if someone working for a candidate did such a thing, it must not have been authorized.”