Is this seriously the advice we want to be giving this guy? For one thing, it wouldn’t work and we all know it. After six weeks of deep meditation in the woods, he’d come back and declare that the real problem with his first two years was poor “messaging.” For another thing, I thought the conservative narrative about The One is that he has a master plan to transform America in an irretrievably statist way. In that case, why give him more time to game it out? Picture him sitting there on a tree stump, head in hand a la Rodin’s “The Thinker,” hatching ever new and creative ways to push amnesty through Congress or get Scott Brown to back cap-and-trade or whatever insane, fantastically expensive idea he’s been mulling lately. The better advice would be for him to stay focused on whatever minor hobbyhorse the “angry left” is consumed with lately. For instance, there’s only so much damage he could do by obsessing about “don’t ask, don’t tell.” How about that as a distraction?

Does Newt seriously believe this stuff, by the way, or is this just his attempt at turning Obama’s condescending nonsense about how voters weren’t thinking clearly back at him? If the latter, I like it.