RENO'S HANDLING OF ELIAN SHOWS HOW MUCH WE NEED A STRONG LEADER

Why is Janet Reno elevating the case of little Elian Gonzalez? Has the attorney general of the United States of America nothing better to do than to involve herself here, so personally, so completely, so ... daily?

This precious little boy is a living, breathing example of Emma Lazarus' throat-catching words inscribed in the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/the wretched refuse of your teeming shore/ ... Send them, tempest tossed, to me."

The simple fact is that Janet Reno demonstrates the truth of Britt Hume's astute observation last weekend on Fox News Sunday, the best of the weekend talk shows. Ms. Reno, Hume observed, has consistently confused integrity with simple, blind stubbornness. Months ago, though, I decided that the prize for pungent one-liners on the case of this brave little Cuban boy was captured by the incomparable George Will. Speaking on ABC's Sunday show, Will quipped that he wished we would all, in due course, "discover that the boy's father is a smoker." Would the politically correct, fanatically anti-tobacco Clinton administration insist on sending the boy back to a smoking household, a practice tantamount to child abuse according to so many Clintonoids?

Never during the last decade have we needed President Ronald Reagan as we do now. Can you imagine the Gipper ordering his AG to pack an innocent little refugee boy off to the slave hellhole that is Castro's Cuba without a custody hearing in state court, focusing on the question: "What is the best interest of the child?"

Reagan would instinctively have seen, and made clear to Americans, the simple stakes: freedom precious, irreplaceable, worth-dying-for freedom to live your life, breathing its bracing air. For those who deal in moral equivalence between the squalid Castro regime and the U.S., I ask: How many Americans have you seen riding in inner tubes to get to Cuba?

Last weekend, Fred Barnes of Fox's "Beltway Boys" had a question for Mort Kondracke: "If your child washed up on American shores and you wanted to come here to retrieve him, and he was in Chicago, would you fly to Detroit?" Kondracke had to concede his friend's point: The father was flown as Castro's prisoner not to Miami, despite the pleas of his relatives there, but to the tender mercies of the nice folks at Castro's embassy in the District of Columbia. From that front porch, all Cuban soil, all the time, he delivers Castroite scripts handed him by his keepers, this brutal dictator's thugs, always hovering nearby.

Of course, the last time Janet Reno was in the business of making child-welfare decisions, a whole bunch of them ended up being burned alive. For that atrocity she blandly took "responsibility," to the applause of the sort of liberal editorial writers who now approve of her action in sending this boy back to slavery.

"Whatever else she may be," writes Washington Times editor Wes Pruden of our splendid chief federal law enforcer, "Janet Reno is consistent. She saves' children wholesale, as she did at Waco, and she saves' them retail, as she is determined to do with Elian Gonzalez.

"It's tough on the children, particularly when she gives an order for the feds to burn their house down. That's just a risk this brave lady is willing to take."

Would we have sent a boy back to East Germany, in 1961, whose mother had been slain trying to get him across the Wall?

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.