Hey, This Panama Thing Isn’t in My Job Description

Nobody told George Bush it was going to be like this.

During his campaign, they told him the presidency was going to be about the Pledge of Allegiance and keeping Willie Horton in prison and read-my-lips-no-new-taxes. Because that is what the election was about.

But now Bush is just into his second hundred days in office and what has the presidency really been about? The S&L; crisis and a $157 billion bailout plan. John Tower. An oil spill in Alaska. Gorbachev’s popularity in Western Europe. Three fatal fires aboard U.S. naval vessels in less than a month. And Panama.

You can imagine Bush’s consternation.

You can imagine him summoning his people into the Oval Office and telling them: “You promised me this was going to be about horseshoe pitching and pork rinds! And now it’s about all this other stuff and Manuel Noriega. What happened?”

Unfortunately, many analyses written about Bush’s first 100 days in office accused him of being slow-moving and indecisive. I wish the press would stop writing things like this. It is like waving a red flag at a bull.

Personally, I like my Presidents slow-moving. In most cases, the more slow-moving, the better.

Ronald Reagan was fast-moving when he sent U.S. Marines to Beirut (against the advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff) and was even faster-moving when, after they were blown up, he invaded Grenada. Just to take our minds off things.

So I would not like George Bush to get the idea that the best way to look decisive is to invade whatever country seems to need invading at the moment. I don’t want him wandering around the War Room saying: “Gee, Panama doesn’t look that far away. I’ll bet we could get in there and get out by Christmas.”

I admit our past efforts in Panama have not worked so far, even though they were very well-intentioned. Under Ronald Reagan, we indicted Noriega for drug trafficking, even though there was no hope of getting him to come to the United States to face trial.

Amazingly, this made him angry and difficult to work with.

To try to make things better, we recently sent one of our national treasures, Jimmy Carter, down to see that the elections in Panama were conducted fairly.

And you can understand how much Noriega’s forces must have feared that.

“Uh-oh,” they must have said. “Carter’s coming! We better not try to steal any votes now! No way!”

Actually, I think we sent Carter to Panama in the hopes he would be impounded at Customs, but nobody bothered. Unfortunately this has allowed Carter to appear on talk shows all over America. Even as I write this, Carter is traveling to smaller and smaller media markets to get interviewed. But pretty soon now he is going to walk into some 300-watt radio station and some talk show host is finally going to ask him: “By the way, did you ever get the hostages back? Or what?”

In any case, Carter was followed to Panama by 2,000 U.S. troops to supplement the forces we already have there. The function of these troops is to guard the Panama Canal until we turn it over to Noriega.

That’s right. We have a treaty that says we must do that. The treaty was one of the great achievements of Jimmy Carter’s Administration.

Nobody much cared about it at the time. Now, George Bush doesn’t know what to do with it. If he says we aren’t going to give the canal back, the rest of Central America will hate us and we don’t want that. But if we give the canal back and Noriega is still in power, he could close the canal and turn it into a water-slide theme park or whatever.

So Bush is trying to find a solution.

Over the weekend, on his way to give a speech in Mississippi, Bush called reporters forward on Air Force One for an important announcement. He “leaned forward in his swivel chair,” according to one account, and told the press that the people of Panama ought to rise up and overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega.

In his words, “they ought to do everything they can to get Mr. Noriega out of there . . . the will of the people should not be thwarted by this man and a handful of these Doberman thugs.”

Was there anything Bush wanted to say to temper the call for revolution in another nation? a reporter asked.

“No, I would add no words of caution,” Bush said.

This statement is not as stark as it seems. Because Bush has already tried caution in Panama.

In one of his first “covert” operations (though how it can be covert if we all know about it, I have not figured out), Bush authorized the spending of $10 million for “an operation designed to force Noriega from office, an effort that relied on sporadic clandestine radio broadcasts.”

But our $10 million worth of “sporadic clandestine radio broadcasts” did not drive Noriega from office. (What can these broadcasts have been? “Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits”? “The John Denver Christmas Special”?)

So the President has tried caution and the President has tried radio and who knows what is next.

But whatever he tries next in Panama, I don’t want anyone to accuse him of being a wimp.

He’s not.

And I don’t want him to try to prove it.