On the other hand, perhaps most of the 81 percent think that "wrong direction" means, among many other things, the following:

-- Forty years of left-wing control of the news media, of Hollywood, of the public schools, of the universities and of nearly every big city government have nearly ruined those institutions.

-- Forty years of a litigation explosion has had terrible social and economic effects.

-- Children are being prematurely sexualized through early sex education.

-- A generation of children is being frightened about too much -- from seesaws to dodgeball to ring-a-levio to secondhand smoke to the destruction of the world caused by global warming.

-- The left's war against Judeo-Christian values as the bases of American values is leaving us morally rudderless.

-- Redefining marriage to include people of the same sex for the first time in history, while compassionate to gays, will be disorienting to young people when forming their sexual identities.

-- Multiculturalism is destroying the concept of an American culture and people. Obama and the Democrats even opposed declaring English as America's national language.

So 81 percent of Americans are right. We are on the wrong track. But the future of America entirely depends on what track it is most Americans think is wrong, and if they really believe that the radical "change" Obama and the Democrats advocate will be the right track. If so, it may mark the beginning of the end of the America that our parents and their parents and their parents back to America's founding lived in. The left, given its demonization of America's history, would welcome that. Would the American people?