In Reinhold Niebuhr's terminology, Cornel West could probably be described as idealistic and President Obama as realistic.
Next, I want to turn to Cornel West's characterization of President Obama: "Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable."
I have no way to assess whether or not President Obama "is very apprehensive," as Cornel West says he is, around independent black folk. However, President Obama himself seems to me to be a rather independent person.
Moreover, he did suffer taunts about the color of his skin from other boys when he was growing up in Indonesia, as Janny Scott details in her book A SINGULAR WOMAN: THE UNTOLD STORY OF BARACK OBAMA'S MOTHER (2011). As a result of those taunts, young Barack Obama learned how to stay cool, calm, and collected as the way to cope with them and thereby deflect them, so that the taunts did not get to him. His generally unflappable demeanor strikes me as a great strength, not a sign of rootlessness or deracination.
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