Cornel West is happy that Mitt Romney didn’t win the 2012 election, but he had a few choice words for President Obama on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. West said that the president should be focusing on issues such as poverty and prison, and that it’s a shame that politicians spend so much money on elections.
But the kicker is when he calls newly re-elected Obama a "Rockefeller Republican in Blackface:"
 

I think 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 1 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. So it’s very sad. I mean, I’m glad there was not a right-wing takeover, but we end up with a Republican, a Rockefeller Republican in blackface, with Barack Obama, so that our struggle with regard to poverty intensifies.

Tavis Smiley offered a softer approach in responding to the president’s priorities.

“We don’t believe in making excuses. We believe that if [Obama] is not pushed, he’s going to be a transactional president and not a transformational president. And we believe that the time is now for action and no longer accommodation. But that doesn’t happen unless you’re pushed.”

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 (Photo: Scott Gries/Getty Images)