Kamala Harris Names FDR, JFK, LBJ and Obama as Top Presidents, Skips Joe Biden Entirely

Kamala Harris was asked a simple question on Friday, July 31, at the National Urban League Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. National Urban League President Marc Morial asked her to rank the top three most effective presidents in American history.

She named four. Joe Biden wasn't one of them.

"Oh Marc, don't make me do that," Harris said before launching into Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and later, Barack Obama.

What She Said

Harris spent the most time on Roosevelt. She praised his three terms in office, credited Eleanor Roosevelt's role, and pointed to his push for Social Security and his (unsuccessful) effort to expand the Supreme Court. "When I think about what he did in terms of investing in the people during dire times... I think that he was a very important president," she said, according to the National Urban League remarks reported by the New York Post and separately transcribed by Unilad and the Irish Star.

She then credited Kennedy with "laying the groundwork" that Johnson "followed up on," without much elaboration.

Obama got the most policy-specific praise. Harris singled out the Affordable Care Act, saying it addressed "a health care system that has failed anyone other than the rich" and that Obama "took a lot of heat for it."

Biden's name never came up. Not as a fifth name, not as a footnote.

Why It's Notable

Harris was Biden's vice president from 2021 to 2025. When Biden dropped out of the 2024 race in July 2024, he endorsed Harris with roughly 107 days left before the election, a title she later used for her own campaign memoir, "107 Days." She lost the Electoral College and the popular vote to Donald Trump.

The relationship between the two has been visibly strained since. In her memoir, Harris wrote that Biden's decision to seek a second term was "reckless," and that she was in the "worst position" to tell him not to run because he would have seen it as "naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty."

She's also described a tense phone call from Biden just before her 2024 debate with Trump, telling the Diary of a CEO podcast that Biden warned her people were talking poorly about her in Pennsylvania. "My takeaway is his motivation was all about himself," she said. "It wasn't about my performance at the debate." She added she still has "a great deal of affection" for him.

For his part, Biden told The View in September 2024 that as vice president, "there wasn't a single thing that I did that she couldn't do," and that he delegated foreign and domestic policy responsibility to Harris. That comment came while he was campaigning for her, but critics, including Breitbart News, have pointed to it as Biden effectively assigning Harris responsibility for the administration's record on inflation, the southern border, and the Afghanistan withdrawal.

The Omission

A reasonable defense of Harris: she was asked for her top three, not a comprehensive ranking of every president she's worked with or admired. Naming FDR, JFK, and LBJ, then adding Obama, is not inherently a slight. Plenty of people asked to name history's most "effective" presidents wouldn't reach for the guy they just served under, especially one whose approval ratings cratered by the end of his term.

The omission does not happen in a vacuum. Harris has spent the past year, in her memoir and in interviews, distancing herself from Biden's decision-making and second-term judgment while still calling him a friend. Skipping him entirely, in a room full of supporters, after being handed an open-ended question about presidential greatness, reflects a deliberate positioning.

Harris also used the same appearance to talk about the importance of "speaking the truth and being honest with the people," a line multiple outlets, including the New York Post as cited by Breitbart, flagged as awkward given her past defenses of Biden's fitness for office while in the West Wing.

None of the outlets covering the moment, Breitbart, OK Magazine, Unilad, or the Irish Star, reported that Harris was asked directly about the Biden omission afterward, or that her team issued any clarifying statement. Whether she addresses it head-on, or whether it becomes another data point in the Harris-Biden rift heading into any future political moves either makes, remains an open question.