Despite some commentators’ giddy excitement about President Barack Obama’s reelection, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West took a different stand, calling out the president for some of the shortcomings of his administration and his reelection campaign on the issue of poverty. Of course, Smiley and West have their own critics, in part due to West’s occasional propensity to use highly charged language, such as his 2010 contention that Obama’s policies led to racist effects.
Speaking on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! show, Smiley and West tore into the president. Calling Obama “a Rockefeller Republican in blackface,” West charged “that it’s morally obscene and spiritually profane to spend $6 billion on an election, $2 billion on a presidential election, and not have any serious discussion—poverty, trade unions being pushed against the wall dealing with stagnating and declining wages when profits are still up and the one percent are doing very well, no talk about drones dropping bombs on innocent people. So we end up with such a narrow, truncated political discourse, as the major problems—ecological catastrophe, climate change, global warming.”
West didn’t let up: “Richard Nixon is to the left of him on healthcare. Richard Nixon is to the left of him on guaranteed income. And the same policies in terms of imperial foreign policy is at work.” Calling the president’s use of unmanned drones to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in other countries “war crimes,” West went on to describe Obama’s signing of the National Defense Authorization Act as “crypto-fascist.”
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