Family First
Down to earth and true to her roots, Cheri Daniels is right where she wants to be –– in Indiana
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Earlier this year, while her husband was being hounded by nearly every major news organization about a possible run for the presidency, the first lady of Indiana arrived incognito for a photo shoot.
This time, however, Cheri Daniels was not the subject.
Working wordlessly with the photographer, Cheri gently lifted the arms of a 2-week-old sleeping infant and positioned his tiny hands and feet for the photo.
The photographer, Meredith Daniels Gradle, 27, the third of Mitch and Cheri Daniels’ four daughters, smiled broadly at her mother.
“You are my best assistant because we communicate without words,” Meredith later told her. The memory brings tears to Cheri’s eyes.
As they packed up Meredith’s gear, the mother of the infant who booked the photo shoot walked up to Cheri.
“You look familiar,” she said. “Do I know you?”
“I’m married to the governor,” Cheri replied with a little smile.
“That’s it! I knew you looked familiar!”
It’s as revealing a portrait as any of the “story behind the story” — the reason Cheri couldn’t quite see a run for the highest office in the country in the future of their family.
In the national spotlight
Cheri is a public person who straddles the line of privacy, flying just above and below the radar, and she likes it that way. With 18 months left in her husband’s gubernatorial term, she envisions bouncing grandchildren on her knee someday soon and hosting impromptu family get-togethers. She values intimate dinners with friends and treasures shoe-shopping forays with her buddies.
Her vision of the next chapter of life was not in sync with the grind of a national campaign. Incognito photo shoots go out the window on a presidential bus tour.
“When you take the world stage, your anonymity is gone,” Cheri says. “You lose your life as you know it forever.”
The opportunity that faced Mitch Daniels and the mounting encouragement from the GOP to run for president represented a fork in the road for his entire family. Their decision came down to the wire at the end of May.
“In the beginning, when we discussed it, it was no, no, no, no,” Cheri recalls. “But the longer it went, it just snowballed.”
There was even a phone call to Cheri from former first lady Laura Bush, once a reluctant campaign wife herself. She is a family friend from Mitch’s days as White House budget director.
“We appreciate all the people who have so much faith in him and are willing to support Mitch,” Cheri says.
“There were a lot of people saying to Mitch that it was his duty and his moral obligation to run. That is true in one sense, but in reality, your moral obligation is to yourself and to your family.”
Cheri says everyone in their family, including all four daughters and the three sons-in-law, weighed in on the pros and cons of a national campaign. There were considerable security and privacy concerns.
The national media already was diving into the most painful years of their lives. In 1993, after 15 years of marriage, Cheri and Mitch separated and then divorced. Cheri married a man in California and split her time between the two states to accommodate their shared child custody. She bought a home in Indiana and commuted. In 1997, she divorced and remarried Mitch.
She considers it a private family matter irrelevant to his political service. In 2004, Mitch told The Indianapolis Star, “If you like happy endings, you’ll love our story. Love and the love of children overcame any problems.”
But it already was kicking up national dust.
“There are stories that came out in the media that said I abandoned my children. Outright lies,” Cheri says. “Some members of the media don’t bother to check the facts anymore.”
Cheri, who paid her own way through Indiana University after high school, emerging with a journalism degree, was dismayed by what she calls a media recklessness that stood to sweep her entire family into the fray.
Her husband eventually released the following written statement, hoping to put an end to the speculation: “The notion that Cheri ever did or would ‘abandon’ her girls or parental duty is the reverse of the truth.”
He called the idea “absurd to anyone who knows her, as I do, to be the best mother any daughter ever had.”
Making a decision
Cheri says the national campaign decision was daunting and stressful.
“It was a difficult 12 months of talking about the decision, putting it away, and bringing it back out again,” she says.
Cheri insists the deciding vote did not come down to her alone.
“Absolutely not,” she says, sitting in the living room of the official governor’s residence. “Obviously, though, I had a big part in the decision.”
She says it ultimately came down to lifestyle, not avoidance.
Mitch’s announcement May 22 made front-page headlines nationwide.
“In the end, I was able to resolve every competing consideration but one,” he wrote in a late-night e-mail. “The interests and wishes of my family is the most important consideration of all. If I have disappointed you, I will always be sorry.”
The midnight e-mail continued: “Our family constitution gives a veto to the women’s caucus, and there is no override provision.”
Even as calls poured in the next day, Cheri was flooded with relief.
“When you are on the fence you feel so much pressure, but when you finally make the decision it is like a weight is lifted,” Cheri says.
“People have been kind to us,” she notes. “They say, ‘We really would have liked to see him run, but he turned it down for all the right reasons.’”
The Sunday of the announcement felt like Independence Day to Cheri.
“You just feel like, ‘Now I know where we’re going. Now we’re moving forward.’”
Armed with that knowledge, Cheri stands on the threshold of yet another passage in her life.
Doing it her way
Forgoing the national spotlight offers Cheri more opportunity to delve into that which feels most natural to her — the sights and sounds of Indiana, once-a-week dinners with friends, the peace and sanctity of her back porch, and the job she has come to embrace — first lady of the state of Indiana.
To no one’s surprise but her own, Cheri has grown into her public role with grace and ease. Those who know her best describe her as genuine, friendly, funny and down to earth.
“Cheri can talk to anybody. She puts on no airs,” says Katherine Bumen, her friend for 35 years.
Cheri and Katherine met while working in the financial office at Indiana University Medical Center shortly after Cheri moved north to Indianapolis.
“She used to walk up to deliver the bounced checks, that ponytail of hers swingin’,” Katherine says.
She was immediately drawn to Cheri’s spirit. “She is one tough lady, extremely strong. But she has that southern Indiana softness, just like her mother. Cheri is naturally nice, and she instills it in her children.”
Cheri’s confidence in the role of first lady has grown exponentially over the past six years.
In 2004, in an interview with Indianapolis Woman from her Geist-area home, Cheri was pensive about public appearances.
“He’s the candidate. I’m not,” she said seven years ago, trying to imagine her future life in the spotlight.
Reading the quote back to her brings a smile. She has found her voice, in more ways than one.
Now she takes the microphone and podium with ease, delivering most of her speeches on her core issues of education, literacy, physical fitness and heart health without the benefit of notes.
Her partnership with the American Heart Association in the Go Red for Women campaign has brought considerable awareness to the prevention of the disease that claimed the life of her mother, Mary Lou Herman.
“Her passing was very painful for Cheri,” her friend Katherine says. “Heart health is extremely personal to her.”
Literacy is a passion as well. Cheri regularly visits schools across the state where she reads to children and often joins them for lunch, chatting as she sits at their tables.“I love working with the school children and watching their eyes light up when we read together,” Cheri says.
She has crisscrossed the state, leading fitness walks, meeting with service clubs and connecting to Hoosiers through what she calls the most high-profile volunteer job in the state.
“My domestic skills have suffered,” Cheri grins. “I am frequently gone all day. I have no one at home to help me fold and fluff, so I sometimes have the same load of laundry sitting there for a week!”
“What you see is what you get with Cheri,” Katherine notes. “She is Hoosier through and through, and that is why she connects with people here.”
Those Hoosier connections
The Indiana State Fair puts Cheri in her element. The first lady makes an appearance each of its 17-day run, every year. In fact, Cindy Hoye, the fair’s executive director, says there’s no better event ambassador than Cheri.
When Cheri milked a cow, it leaned in, nearly crushing her –– a sign of affection, she was told.
When she spit watermelon seeds, she won the contest. She has flag-started the demolition derby, flipped flapjacks and sawed a log.
And when Cheri was asked to spit a cricket, she ever-so-politely agreed.
“I won’t do that again,” she says. “Big mistake.”
Indiana events like the State Fair bring out the little girl from New Albany in Cheri, the working-class daughter of a railroad worker and homemaker and granddaughter of Baseball Hall of Famer Billy Herman.
“I love the people at the fair,” she says. “Pioneer Village and visiting the 4-H barn. These people are salt of the earth.”
She has learned to go from barns to ballrooms in a single day.
“The role of first lady has forced me to put myself in positions and places I never dreamed I would be. Sometimes you wind up getting pleasure, satisfaction and confidence from the things you least expect.”
On the night of May 12, with 1,100 people and the national media gathered in Indianapolis for her speech at the Indiana Republican Party spring dinner, Cheri pulled out her red power dress and stepped on stage to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ “Sherry,” accompanied by thunderous applause.
She basked in the moment.
“I thought everybody was waiting for me to pull the trigger (on a presidential run) that night. To give some sign. We had tried to tell them otherwise. But I thought, I am going to go, stand in my power and do exactly what I planned, only with everyone watching. Talk about what it is like to be first lady of Indiana.”
She joked a little and talked about the issues near and dear to her.
“I did it my way,” she says with a big smile.
It surprised no one who knows her well.
Cheri has a close circle of friends, some of whom have known her for more than 30 years.
“It is so important to surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth,” Cheri says. “Not ‘yes’ people, but people who really know you, love you and tell you not what you want to hear but what you need to hear.”
One of her friends began scanning the newspaper and web on Cheri’s behalf when she was put off by the negative media coverage.
“She didn’t sugarcoat it, but she told me what I needed to know,” Cheri says. “I would be lost without my friends. When we’re together, we laugh a lot.”
At least once a week, Cheri goes out to dinner with one or more of the “girls.”
“My friend Peggy and I sometimes go on deer hunts after dinner,” Cheri says. “We drive way up north on country roads looking for deer just to gaze at them. We think they’re beautiful!”
Making a move for health
Physical fitness is a way of life for the first lady. At age 61, Cheri is in better personal shape than many women half her age.
She is 25 pounds lighter than when she tenuously assumed the role of Indiana’s first lady, nervous about the public spotlight.
Back then, with their youngest child in college, Cheri expected to be powering down rather than powering up. Along came her husband’s run for governor and a gnawing sense she needed to get up and move — literally.
Always a fitness buff, she started walking to burn off steam and steady her nerves. Soon she was up to 10 miles — five in the morning and five at night.
“The walking really calmed me. When Mitch first started as governor and I was tense, the walking leveled me. I had conversations in my head and worked through issues and concerns.”
Soon, she became a walking display for her fitness and heart health platforms, and requests for appearances began pouring in.
The national press assumed her higher public profile was another sign she and her husband were ramping up for a national campaign.
“Speculation — not truth,” Cheri says.
Social networking
Cheri’s idea of social networking is having small groups of friends and other couples over for dinner and whipping up a gourmet meal in the kitchen. She misses cooking for her daughters, now that three of four are married and all of them have moved out of the house.
Cheri is close to all four daughters and is in touch with one or more every day.
Meagan, 31, works for Habitat for Humanity and lives with her husband in Bloomington.
“I spent my 61st birthday helping her build a Habitat house,” Cheri says proudly.
Melissa, 29, lives and works in Indianapolis. Her husband recently returned from a tour of duty overseas.
Twenty-five-year old Maggie, the youngest, is an investment banker in New York City and the only member of the Daniels brood not yet married.
Who is likely to deliver the first grandchild?
Cheri has her money on Meredith, 27, who works a full-time job in Indianapolis and has her photography business on the side.
“I don’t want to put pressure on any of them, but the first time I assisted Meredith in a newborn photo shoot I watched how comfortable she was handling a 6-day-old baby. She is quite natural.”
Cheri built a “bunkroom” full of beds in their new Carmel home with grandchildren in mind.
The topic that brings tears to Cheri’s eyes is the close connection she maintains with her daughters and her delight in watching each of them pursue their passions.
“I am at a time in my life when I am enjoying being near them. When and if I am a grandmother, I don’t want to be flying all over the world. I want to be right here, right in the middle of it.”
She does not rule out a big next job in their future, even one that would take her husband to Washington.
“Mitch has always had a big job. All but 10 years of his professional life, he has served in government. He commuted between Washington and Indianapolis when he worked for President Bush. Definitely I would have more flexibility to go back and forth now should something (of that nature) be in his future. But Indiana is home.”
And right now, Indiana’s first lady is right where she wants to be: spending downtime in the morning with a cup of coffee on the back porch, alone with the hummingbirds.
A wife, mother and friend, she is a public figure who maintains her privacy and lives life on her own terms.
“We don’t know what the future holds for us,” she says. “Who does? But we know it’s going to be good.”
One Comment on "Cheri Daniels | Feature, July 2011"
I just loved this story. Anne did an amazing job bringing out the real Cheri Daniels.