President Bush has fallen on hard times. His public opinion ratings are somewhere down in the 30s. He wouldn't win the election if Americans were voting for president again today.

We won't vote again today, or tomorrow, either. President Bush has two years to go in his second four-year term. We hold democracy in high regard, but if we had a 100 percent democracy, the president would have to leave office if something he proposed was defeated by a vote in Congress.

People who don't like President Bush are more vocal than those who do like him. I don't know where all the people who voted for him have gone since the last election but they aren't speaking up much these days. The media, editorial page writers and columnists, are almost 100 percent critical of President Bush. One thing you have to give this president is that he sticks with what he believes even when he's wrong. He doesn't change his mind when presented with facts that contradict his opinion.

For example, President Bush has pushed the idea of lowering taxes for those with the largest incomes. No amount of argument to the contrary by knowledgeable economists has made him change his mind. Call him stubborn or call him unwilling to learn but don't call him indecisive.

The president decided what the United States should do in Iraq and we're doing it. It seems as though it was a wrong decision but it doesn't seem wrong to President Bush and we put him in charge of deciding on things like this. Democracy is inoperative in this case. We don't vote on what is done in Iraq, so the will of the people doesn't determine or even influence the actions we take.

In view of the chasm between President Bush and the majority of Americans now, six years after he was elected, it seems as though we probably ought to change our system.

It may be heresy or even anti-American to say it, but the vote of "the people" does not always accurately represent the beliefs of the majority. Furthermore, what the majority believes is not necessarily what's right. A lot of people can be just as wrong as a small number of them.

In the last presidential election, only 55 percent, a little more than half, of all eligible voters went to the polls. We should, collectively, be ashamed of ourselves. We talk endlessly of pride in our democracy, yet only about half of us participated in what we claim to be proud of. I would think that those Americans who did vote were smarter and better educated than the 45 percent who did not but that's just a prejudiced guess on my part. And if voters are smarter and democracy really is the best system of government, how come they elected George W. Bush?

Fifteen presidents have been elected with less than 50 percent of the vote. Just in recent years, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were all elected with less than a popular majority. Something is wrong there.

It's probably good for us that democracy doesn't work perfectly, though. "The People" collectively are probably as apt to be wrong about what's good for us as a king or a dictator would be. Democracy is just another form of dictatorship. The dictator in the United States is us, and we make mistakes.

There have been times in our history when a strong president like FDR has overridden our law, tradition or popular opinion. I don't think President Bush has been right about Iraq. I just think we have to stop carping and allow for the possibility that he's right, or change our laws and remove him from office.