You can't be remotely familiar with Cornel West and believe that his beef with Obama just came from some personal slight. Obama's entire term in office was diametrically opposed to the direction West said we needed to go. West is an avowed non-Marxist socialist, while Obama filled his administration with bankers and gave Wall Street a full pass for the financial crisis. West is strong anti-violence and anti-imperialism, while Obama quadrupled down on the drone wars. And Cornel West literally wrote the book on "Race Matters" and thought that Black issues needed to be put at the forefront of the new administration, including mass incarceration, while Obama barely touched those things while in office. Obama didn't hold police to account, he remained a stanch supporter of Israel, he supported "market forces" in virtually every place the Republicans had. Obama was the quintessential neoliberal and Cornel West can't stand neoliberals.
Hell, if you wanted to claim it was personal, you'd be better off pointing out that one of Obama's first acts in office was to choose former World Bank chief economist and US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers to head the National Economic Council. Summers is the exact guy that West had his most public feud with and the reason he left Harvard.
No one can pretend to know anything about Cornel West, and then think he would have been the least bit happy with Barack Obama's presidency:
Our hope and change candidate fell short time and time again. Obama cheerleaders who refused to make him accountable bear some responsibility
www.theguardian.com
Trying to demean Cornel West as a "political activist" is lame. He's a philosopher, an educator, and a social commentator who speaks on politics as it is relevent to America's future. His full-time gig is as a professor and social critique first.