Politics & Power Quote by Cornel West

West is doing something sly here: he strips the presidency of its usual democratic mystique and reframes it as a job interview with the real boss. Calling Wall Street and corporate elites the "permanent government" is a deliberate provocation, borrowing the language of the "deep state" but swapping conspiratorial fog for a material, legible power structure: capital that outlasts elections, administrations, and even public memory.

The line works because it compresses a whole political theory into plain speech. "Every president needs to deal with" sounds almost managerial, as if the Oval Office is just another node in a larger organization chart. That quiet inevitability is the point. West isn't arguing that politicians sometimes cater to donors; he's implying that the system is built to require it. The repetition of "permanent government of the country" adds a drumbeat fatalism, daring listeners to deny what they suspect is true.

Subtextually, West is also taking aim at the comfort story voters are sold: that individual charisma, party branding, or policy white papers are the main plot. His real question is relational, not ideological: who owns leverage, who sets boundaries, who gets access. In the post-2008 era of bailouts, revolving doors, and campaign-finance arms races, "relationship" becomes a euphemism for dependency.

Context matters: West speaks as a moral critic in a tradition that treats economics as an ethical battleground. The sentence ends awkwardly ("the questions becomes"), but that roughness reads less like a slip than urgency: a professor breaking cadence to insist the premise be faced before any campaign promise is believed.