Mobs looted stores, vandalized cars, set fire to buildings, and clashed with police in Baltimore after the death of Freddy Gray in April 2015. The same scene played out in Ferguson, Missouri, half a year earlier, and on a lesser scale in several other cities across the U.S. since that time.

But when asked last week about race relations under this president, White House press secretary Josh Earnest had this to say:

Earnest: “I think you’d be very hard-pressed to make a case that somehow the African-American population of the United States is somehow not better off based on President Obama’s tenure.”

Voters paint a grim racial picture of America. That’s how Rasmussen Reports summarizes its recent poll, which indicates only nine percent of all voters agree with the White House spokesman. That same poll says 60 percent think race relations are worse since President Obama’s election in 2008.

American Family Association‘s Abraham Hamilton III says those numbers can be traced directly to Obama. “He seems to have consistently waded into territories concerning racial tensions to continuously stoke the fire of the tensions as opposed to being a reconciler or a unifier,” he offers.

That’s consistent with what columnist Jeff Jacoby said just a little more than three years into Obama’s first term:

“The would-be uniter whips up envy and resentment, demonizing those who disagree with him, and aggravating the nation’s racial, class, and party tensions …. Obama has repeatedly taken the low road. He has widened the fissures he promised to close, and lowered the political tone he promised to elevate.”

Hamilton

Now as Obama nears the end of his second term, Hamilton says the solutions to the current tensions in America are as much economic as they are racial. But he contends the president can help, if he would start talking about what Americans have in common instead of their differences.

“He has failed to hit that tone for the country and has continued to stoke the fire of that old, routinely played Democratic strategy of dividing our country based on skin color lines,” Hamilton laments.

He says it would also help if the president would stop politicizing the issue and reign in his over-intrusive Justice Department.