ASHINGTON - Vice President Al Gore refused yesterday to support the administration's intervention to return Elian Gonzalez to his father, instead issuing a brief statement reiterating his view that the conflict should have been resolved in a family court ''with the family coming together.''
Gore broke with the administration over Elian and has weathered criticism since, with opponents accusing him of flip-flopping to appease the politically powerful Cuban-American community in Florida, a state he hopes to carry in the presidential election.
But he has hardly been the only politician feeling pressure to take a stand on the Elian case.
Texas Governor George W. Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, issued a statement yesterday criticizing the show of force and, tying his opponent to the actions in Miami, attributed the tense events to the ''Clinton-Gore administration.''
''I am profoundly saddened and troubled that the administration was not able to negotiate a resolution and instead decided to use force to take a little boy from the place he calls home in the middle of the night,'' Bush said. ''The chilling picture of a little boy being removed from his home at gunpoint defies the values of America and is not an image a freedom-loving nation wants to show the world.''
But Bush did not stop there. After Gore released a two-sentence statement essentially agreeing with Bush - saying he wished the matter had been resolved differently, and praising Miami residents for their generally restrained behavior after the raid, a Bush spokesman branded the Gore response as strangely bland and inadequate.
