governor and being regan s ronald regan s budget chief and being george w. bush s budget chief before the iraq war and all that. he would have argued his positions forcefully, even fiercely, but he in the end it wasn t to be. he just couldn t do it given the complexity of his family. howard, what does daniels dropping out to to the race? what does it do to rebalancing the rest of the field? what i think it means, lawrence, we now pretty much have the field we re going to have. yes, michelle bachmann may decide that the allure of iowa and evangelical christians there is so great and she has seven generations worth of family there that she s going to go in and try to mix things up. that s unclear. we basically have the field. we can begin seeing how the race might run. i was fascinated to listen to governor dean talking about iowa. certainly has tremendous experience there. john huntsman is basically going to skip iowa.
doesn t like politics and is uncomfortable in the limelight in general. i think just as important if not more important were the kids. four kids, four daughters, three of them married. i don t think any of those children or inlaws, sons-in-law wanted to spend the next several months talking about the private life of the family. why the wife had left, why she had gone to california, remarried. why she came back. how the kids were affected by that. what did they think. how did they take it. the whole sort of soap opera aspect of it was one that he could not convince his wife let alone his kids to take part in. i think even though he wanted to do it himself, this was a barrier for him. this is the way, howard i want to read the way he put that in his statement. on matters affecting us all, our family constitution gives a veto to the women s caucus and there is no override provision.
win. but they can cause enormous trouble in the primaries. they hate muslims. they hate gays. they hit immigrants. it s a very unattractive painting for the under 35 voters that elected barack obama. that time they re going to be under 39 voters. these are fiscally conservative voters because of what they ve just been through. they are socially not just tolerant but inclusive of all the groups that the right wing is beating up on. huntsman s got some room here. i m going to be fascinated to see. i am somewhat partial to governors. we ve got three solid governors in this race. i m going to be fascinated to see how this goes. former governor howard dean, thanks for joining us tonight. thank you. joining me now is howard nooin, senior editor for the huffington post and an msnbc senior analyst. thank you for joining me tonight. hi, lawrence. howard, the mitch daniels decision, how did he come to that decision? what do we know beyond his statement? what we know is that his wife