No one could blame President Bush for wanting to get out of town after the end of October. He'd just experienced what non-partisan political observer Charles Cook dubbed "the worst week of the worst month of the worst year of the Bush presidency." The president's approval ratings sagged to an all-time low of less than 40 percent; he suffered the humiliation of having his Supreme Court nominee torpedoed by opposition from his own party; the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq passed 2,000; he was lambasted for yet another slow response to a hurricane disaster, in Florida; and influential White House aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, resigned after being indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Unfortunately for Bush, his early-November travel plans took him to Argentina for a two-day hemispheric trade summit of 34 nations, where despite his coaxing, no agreement was reached on resuming stalled negotiations on establishing the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The lesson from that weekend seemed to be that, as bad as things are at home, Bush is even less popular in Latin America. Strikes and mass demonstrations by anti-Bush protesters exploded outside the fortified gates of the hotel where the summit was held.

These days, Bush is bashed from Argentina to Australia, but it is rare to encounter a reasoned critique of the man and his administration presented as a means of enlightening the American public. Our colleague Ian Williams has the talent to do just that. Williams is a busy freelance writer, born in Liverpool but since 1989 based in New York. He serves as The Nation's U.N. correspondent and has been a regular contributor to many of Britain's major newspapers. His latest book, Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776, was published this summer.

Not long ago we criticized the Electoral College method of electing a president as an anti-democratic anachronism. In this issue Williams makes a more far-reaching argument: He sees the presidency itself—embodying the roles of both chief executive and head of state—as an unfortunate relic that the Founding Fathers would have done better to reconsider. Of course, such a critique has no hope of resulting in transformation of any sort. But taking the opportunity occasionally to see things through the eyes of a brilliant foreign correspondent can give us a fresh perspective on the state of our democracy—where we are today and how we got here.

he stately arrival of Prince Charles and his most recent spouse at the White House in early November, shortly after the unstately departure of Vice President Cheney's aide Lewis Libby from the same place, and one hopes, shortly before presidential adviser Karl Rove gets the bum's rush as well, was a thought-provoking event. Americans tend to assume that they have the finest democracy in the world—just as they assume that they have the best health care. It often takes an outside perspective to show up the eminently falsifiable nature of these suppositions, but it is always an uphill struggle.

To celebrate the royal visit, I was invited onto the Fox News channel to tut-tut on TV about the anachronistic nature of England's Windsor line. But alas, since Fox thinks that irony is what they used to make in Pittsburgh, my tongue-in-cheek defense of constitutional monarchy fell somewhat flat. I had forgotten that the untitled Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox, is a republican as well as a Republican. But I notice that he did not exactly exclude his male heirs from the management of News Corp.

When the people at Fox asked me if the monarchy represented privilege, of course I said I could agree in principle, but I pointed out that in the constitutional monarchies of Scandinavia, the Low Countries and Britain, poor people have far more access to health care and education than in the current Georgian America. In fact, in every measurable way these societies are more egalitarian than the United States.

For all his eccentricities, Charles is a convinced environmentalist, who supports the Kyoto Protocol, while George thinks global warming, like evolution (and indeed probably gravity as well) is just a theory, despite the hurricanes that batter hardest at the states that gave him the presidency.