KINDER'S COMMENTARY: RENO AND COMPANY SHOULD BE AMONG TOP CAMPAIGN ISSUES

Americans, we are told, shrugged their shoulders and yawned when told the news. The news, that is, that Attorney General Janet Reno decided not to seek appointment of an independent counsel to probe the manifest corruption in the great Clinton-Gore conspiracy to violate existing campaign-finance laws and subvert American elections with foreign money. This supposed indifference is a fact, if you believe this week's Gallup poll. Perhaps.

Nonetheless, a thoroughly corrupted and corrupting United States Department of Justice, together with the joke of an attorney general who heads it, can, should and must be among the foremost issues of the 1998 off-year campaign. Republicans who spent much of the last year hoping for an independent counsel to do their work for them should quit their whining and get busy. An overwhelming case for massive corruption can be made that will force Democrats to pay a terrible price for acquiescing in the crimes of Clinton-Gore.

Astonishing, isn't it? The chief Democrat on the talk show circuit defending the Clinton administration is U.S. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts. The brilliant, super-articulate and combative Mr. Frank spent the 1980s deriding old Dutch Reagan for not knowing what was going on down at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Then it transpired that Mr. Frank didn't know what was going on in his own basement, where his lover, a seedy guy he met through a personal ad in a gay magazine, was running a male prostitution ring. Sort of gives a new meaning to the Biblical admonition, "By their fruits ye shall know them."

Like the president and attorney general he defends, Barney Frank knows no shame. According to heavyweight New York Times columnist William Safire, John Huang hasn't been notified that he is a federal investigatory target, the subject of an investigation or even been called as a witness. A year has passed and neither the FBI nor the Justice Department has even interrogated Huang, who may well have been a Chinese spy with a top-secret security clearance. Who gave it to him? And why did he take it with him after he left Commerce?

Out in America, though, away from Gallup polls, a different reality prevails. The elections of 1997 were a disaster for Democrats everywhere. GOP demographer John Morgan, who predicted the huge Republican gains of 1994 long in advance, wrote a Nov. 19 memo to House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The trends in 1997, he wrote, "are highly reminiscent of 1994, when the Democratic Party died in rural America." In Virginia this year, "it made no difference if the rural county was traditionally Democrat or Republican, the GOP prevailed." The same was true in judicial races in Pennsylvania. Morgan, again: "Rural and exurban America detests New York and the [northeastern] Megalopolis and does not believe the liberal message coming out of Washington."

It is to this America that Republicans must appeal, with great dividends possible. Step 1: Subpoena FBI director Louis Freeh's memo to Reno.

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