Though he has not announced he’s running for president, Gov. Scott Walker is accumulating supporters on the right side of the blogosphere.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post is not one of them, but he notes Walker’s strengths:

In the scramble of the 2016 Republican presidential nominating contest, everyman Walker hopes to be the otherman, a candidate with potential appeal to many of the competing constituencies in a fissured party.

Walker is a contradiction, a boring warrior. He will not win the charisma primary, but he has been hardened by his experiences in office. Whatever miscalculations he made that led to the explosion of protests in Madison four years ago, he now wears proudly his subsequent battles with the forces on the left.

He takes every opportunity to remind an audience, as he did last week at the RNC meeting in San Diego, that he has been, as he tells it, the No. 1 target of big unions and big government constituencies — and that he has defeated them repeatedly.

His résumé as a second-term governor gives him establishment credentials. His confrontational reform agenda in Wisconsin and his wars with labor unions and the progressive left have made him a well-loved figure among many in the GOP’s tea party wing. His potential fundraising network, thanks to three campaigns in four years — and especially the 2012 recall election — is among the biggest in the GOP, if he can truly tap it.

The son of a minister, he speaks easily the language of religious conservatives. When he appeared before the RNC meeting, he made repeated references to the power of prayer and the comfort it provided him through difficult campaign tests.

He told a story. When his friend Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was selected as Romney’s vice presidential running mate in the summer of 2012, Walker advised him that people would soon be telling him they would be praying for him. When they do that, he told Ryan, “you need to reach out and touch them, because you will feel the power of God.”

Walker is well situated geographically, one of a group of Rust Belt governors who have been talked about as GOP candidates. Others are Ohio’s John Kasich, Indiana’s Mike Pence and, sometimes, Michigan’s Rick Snyder. Of the group, Walker is the only one moving aggressively to assemble a campaign operation.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker doesn’t light up rooms when he enters. He is unassuming in that way, a proud cheesehead who wears a battery-powered electric jacket to keep warm at Packers and Badgers football games. He appears a Midwestern everyman, belied only by his burning ambition to be president. …

Ohio is always a battleground, but Democrats have controlled most other big states in the industrial belt. A Republican nominee who could put into play some of those states — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and maybe even Illinois — would force a recalculation of the Democrats’ current advantage in electoral college math. That’s not to say that Walker could do so, but it would be a calling card he would dangle in front of Republican primary and caucus voters.

His message is a work in progress, not yet as tight or crisp as he will want it to be. His RNC speech was less animated but almost twice as long as one that Perry delivered Friday afternoon. While well received, Walker’s speech did not produce the kind of applause Perry got.

Walker presents himself as an outsider to the nation’s capital and a fresh face in contrast to those with bigger names and longer time in the national spotlight (but who, like Romney and Bush, have been out of office for years). The outlines of his message include the assertion that Washington needs what Wisconsin has gotten under Walker — a reform conservative agenda.

What he did not do when he appeared before party leaders, as some other candidates will do as they go around the country, was say that he could bring the two parties together in Washington, that he would work across party lines to produce harmony and productivity.

He favors a bold and conservative agenda and leadership by a firm hand. He says that voters who don’t agree with all his views still appreciate that style. His state has been deeply polarized around his governorship, but he has managed to prevail at home in spite of that.

There are many questions about a Walker candidacy that go beyond whether he can break through in a field with bigger names and flashier personalities. Is he too much a stolid Midwesterner, too narrow in his Wisconsin grounding. Would he be able to marshal the necessary forces for a national campaign and to let go some of the strategic micromanagement of his own candidacy? Would he be able to withstand the rough-and-tumble ahead?

Walker has focus and determination. His hope may be that he will be long underestimated — a candidate ready to surprise at the moments it counts most.

Thomas Sowell does seem to be a fan:

Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton is honing her message to appeal to the mindset of the left wing of her party, whose support she will need in her second attempt to get the nomination as the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2016.

The left wing’s true believers would of course prefer Senator Elizabeth Warren, who gives them the dogmas of the left pure and straight, uncontaminated by reality. But she says she is not running.

Maybe she thinks the country is not ready to put another rookie senator in the White House. After the multiple disasters of Barack Obama, at home and abroad, that self-indulgence should not be habit-forming.

We can certainly hope that the country has learned that lesson and that Republican rookie senators get eliminated early in the 2016 primaries, so that we can concentrate on people who have had some serious experience running things — and taking responsibility for the consequences — rather than people whose only accomplishments have been in rhetoric and posturing.

The more optimistic among us may hope that the Republicans will nominate somebody who stands for something, rather than the bland leading the bland — the kind of candidates the Republican establishment seems to prefer, even if the voters don’t.

If the Republicans do finally decide to nominate somebody who stands for something, and who has a track record of succeeding in achieving what he set out to do, then no one fills that bill better than Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who has put an end to government employee unions’ racket of draining the taxpayers dry with inflated salaries and extravagant pensions.

That Governor Walker succeeded in reining in the unions, in a state long known for its left-leaning and pro-union politics, shows that he knows how to get the job done. It also shows that he has the guts to fight for what he believes and the smarts to articulate his case and win the public over to his side, rather than pandering to whatever the polls show current opinion to be.

It is hard to explain how a country in which conservatives outnumber liberals could have elected a far-left Congress and a far-left president of the United States, without taking into account how rare are Republicans able and willing to develop the skills of articulation.

As a result, everyone knows what the Democrats stand for, but even some Republicans in Congress seem to have only a hazy idea of what principles Republicans stand for.

The country does not need glib or bombastic talkers. But it does need people with clarity of thought and clarity of words, along with a clear sense of purpose and an ability to achieve those purposes.

Republicans with these qualities seem far rarer in Washington than in state governments. Governors such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Bobby Jindal in Louisiana can both talk the talk and walk the walk. In Congress, not so much.

If you think back to the most politically successful Republican presidents of the 20th century — Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Dwight D. Eisenhower — they were all men who already had the experience of being responsible for results, whether as governors or as a military commander in the case of General Eisenhower.

Those Republican presidents who self-destructed politically — Hoover and Nixon, for example — lacked that kind of background, however much they might have had other assets.

Josh Bernstein is definitely a fan after he picks, and then downplays, 11 other possible GOP choices:

I had productive things to do, so I didn’t watch the State of the (Dis)Union speech Tuesday night.

Jonathan S. Tobin did:

The most interesting aspect of President Obama’s State of the Union speech was not the triumphalist tone with which he trumpeted the recent better economic news or his call for higher taxes, more spending, or his threats to veto any bills passed by a Republican Congress that he didn’t like. All that was expected as the president tacked hard to the left as he began his final two years in office. The most interesting things about the speech were the items that were left out of it. It was those absent acknowledgements of facts that gave the annual example of presidential theater a tone that was so divorced from the reality of Obama’s six years in office.

The most important omission was the fact that there were 83 fewer Democrats in the chamber this year than the last time he gave a State of the Union speech. The historic rejection of both the president’s party and his policies in last November’s midterm elections was treated in the speech as if it had never happened. Though this is the same man who was fond of telling his Republican opponents that elections have consequences, as far as he was concerned, the midterms not only were irrelevant to his assessment of the issues of the day, but he spoke as if the GOP had not increased their majority in the House and taken back the Senate.

While this may be taken as a quibble, it is actually an important point since rather than take into account the fact that a more conservative Congress was now in session, the president spoke as if he was addressing a Democratic-run legislative branch. He set forth a laundry list of liberal agenda items that not only hadn’t a prayer of being passed. Indeed, he had not even consulted congressional leaders to try to get them to consider his ideas but just put them forward as if the views of both his opponents and the voters who had sent them to Washington were unworthy of his notice.

This is significant not just because his presentation of a populist program seemed more about winning the news cycle than passing laws. A willingness to speak of something as true irrespective of its actual connection to truth was the primary characteristic of a speech that at times lost all touch with reality.

All presidents treat anything positive that happens on their watch as being the product of their genius. So we can perhaps forgive the same president whose policies lay behind the slowest and most anemic recovery since World War Two to treat the recent uptick in the economy as solely the result of his heretofore-unsuccessful policies. We may also forgive him for taking credit for lower oil prices that are entirely the result of foreign regimes rather than U.S. policy.

Less forgivable were his boasts of the work of his administration to help veterans since he also omitted the fact that he had spent years ignoring warning signs of corruption and scandal at the Veterans Administration on his watch that led to the death of vets. So too was his bragging about the wonders of ObamaCare while failing to mention the millions who lost coverage or had their premiums skyrocket as well as the prospect of far worse problems in 2015 once the government mandates that he had previously postponed are implemented. His claim that his program to promote community colleges would lower the costs for it to zero only count as truthful if you ignore the fact that the taxpayers will be paying through the nose for a plan with dubious benefits to the country.

Abroad, he paid lip service to the struggle against anti-Semitism and for freedom of speech even though he conspicuously stayed away from the Paris unity march after theCharlie Hebdo terror attack. He claimed to have isolated Russia’s Putin regime after its aggression against Ukraine even though invasions of that country’s territory continue with Moscow rightly believing Obama to be a paper tiger that can be ignored with impunity. He said he had stopped the ISIS terrorists in their tracks when in fact the desultory American bombing campaign has done nothing to turn the tide in a war that the Islamists are clearly winning.

Even worse was his claim that he had halted the Iranian regime’s progress toward a nuclear weapon. The weak interim deal he concluded with Tehran in November 2013 did nothing of the kind. Instead it gave the Islamists a seal of international approval for holding onto their nuclear infrastructure and discarded the economic leverage the West had over them. In a manipulation of language that was Orwellian in scope he asserted that an attempt by a bipartisan coalition in Congress to pass sanctions that would strengthen his hand in the next round of talks (that he has allowed to be extended twice in violation of past pledges) would hurt diplomacy. Understandably Iran doesn’t wish to be pressured by the West to give up its nuclear ambitions. What is not understandable is Obama’s support for that demand. Unmentioned was a clear push for détente with Iran that extends to support for its Syrian ally Bashar Assad that has clear priority over the nuclear issue.

Also not mentioned in the speech was the spread of Boko Haram Islamist terror in Africa, an issue that at least for a few days seemed to have the interest of his wife.

But perhaps the worst aspect of the speech was its conclusion in which the president disingenuously called for a new politics in which partisan passions would be put aside as both sides worked for the betterment of the country. These lines came only minutes after the president threatened to veto any bill he didn’t like and derided his opponents as straw men with questionable motives.

This is the administration that likened Tea Party supporters in Congress to terrorists. This is also the president that used his State of the Union to concentrate on partisan talking points rather than suggestions that had a chance of passage in a Congress that is now controlled by the other party.

For the same man to then pose as the avatar of compromise is more than disingenuous. It speaks to a credibility gap that is as wide as the Grand Canyon. In that context Obama’s mention of his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention in which he sought to portray himself as post-partisan was equal parts nostalgia and satire.