Daniels denies wife had abandoned family

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’s decision not to run for president was based, as much as anything else, on his family’s eagerness to protect its privacy. Yet in making his announcement, he also opened a window onto a painful chapter of their life — the very one that would have drawn uncomfortable scrutiny.

For more than a decade, the governor and his wife, Cheri, had refused to discuss their divorce and remarriage in the 1990s. They have allowed an impression to stand — and be reported in numerous news accounts — that she had abandoned their four daughters, then ages 8 to 14, to move to California to be with another man. Four years after their divorce, she returned and the couple remarried in 1997.

In a separate statement issued to the Indianapolis Star after he announced his decision not to run, Mitch Daniels put that period, and his wife, in a far different light.