In last year's election campaign, Americans heard a lot about the Pledge of Allegiance and Panamanian drugrunners and precious little about the issues that matter to the country's future. If we're ever to have competent government -- and we need it badly --this sort of thing is going to have to change. The following are some of the things that will have to be done:

-- Candidates should not be allowed to hold any more debates. They don't prove a damned thing except who's quicker on his (or her) feet, or, what is more usual, who's done a better job of memorizing lines. While this ability may be a great trait for actors, we've been shown in the last eight years just how poorly it can reflect the abilities of a president. Presidents need to be able to think, and thinking cannot be confined to two-minute time limits.

-- Ban the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge is a loyalty oath. Loyalty oaths are a contradiction to democracies: Hitler made all soldiers in Nazi Germany take them. In fact, when the Pledge first was introduced in 1892 (by a children's magazine and not by the Founding Fathers, as some would have us think), it was to be accompanied by a stiff-armed salute just like the one the Nazis made famous. Ban it, and let's hear no more about it.

-- Eliminate all fees candidates must pay to get on ballots. Needing money to give people the chance to vote for you is not democracy. It is a symptom of plutocracy -- rule by money.

-- Something needs to be done about the Supreme Court. A real democracy does not entrust its most important policy-making powers to the hands of nine nonelected lawyers with a lifetime license to do as they please.

Since Nixon's presidency, judicial self-restraint -- the controversial theory, embraced by Robert Bork, that judges should ensure consistency with existing legislation and constitutional policy, rather than creating it -- has been one of the darling causes of the right. It was not always so.

One of America's first great radical liberals, Thomas Jefferson, railed against the excessive power of the Supreme Court, and many of the reformers of the early 1900s who called for social democracy, the emancipation of women and a war on monopoly capital also supported the shackling of the judiciary. Indeed, one of the first writers in support of judicial self-restraint was Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court justice appointed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most left-wing presidents of the century.

I think reformers of the court would do well to follow the model of the West German Federal Constitutional Court, to which justices are appointed only with the two-thirds approval of the legislature rather than a bare majority. Terms are limited to twelve years, and re-election to the court is impossible.

-- Amend the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College, so that Americans can elect the president directly, and to institute proportional representation, so more parties can be represented in the legislatures. About half of the eligible voters in America don't vote. From that I conclude that most of them don't feel represented by the two main parties, and I can see why.

If 5 percent of the voters voted Libertarian, or Consumer, or whatever, then in the interests of fairness five percent of the legislatures should have to be Libertarian, or Consumer, or whatever. Maybe that would make the major parties wake up and force them to get down to some real business.

This problem goes much deeper, though, and further steps are needed to properly address it, including drastic changes in the way voters are registered. The failure of governments in America to achieve majority votes of the entire population or even anything close to it belies our claim to be a democracy. The land which is said to have given the modern world the idea of the rule "of the people by the people and for the people" is consistently ruled by men elected by a vastly smaller proportion of the people than almost every other republic in the world.

I think one possible solution to the problem would be recognizing the non-voters as a party.

Recognize all eligible voters who do not show up at the polls as a party, with candidates. Their candidates would, of course, be nobody. Thus, if 21 percent of eligible voters in a given election voted Democratic, 33 percent voted Republican, and 46 percent didn't vote at all, the no-votes would have it by a plurality and their candidate would take office -- meaning, of course, that the office would be vacated.

In legislative bodies these elected non-candidates also would be recognized as having votes. All of them abstentions, of course. Which would mean that no legislation in the Senate requiring a two-thirds majority -- such as treaty ratifications -- would pass if more than one third of the Senate seats were vacant.

I believe the men of capability who presently are avoiding government would recognize the desperate situation and would feel themselves forced to run for office to prevent the wreck of the country.

This plan would also force candidates to motivate people to actually go to the polls. To do this, they would have to offer the people -- all of the people -- what they want. And that is what democracy is about.

I suggest that recognizing non-candidates would be the best way to eliminate the present plague of non-entities in our government.