I was there (the only female intellectual-scholar invited), and the tenor of the discussion was one of the instances I was referring to last Saturday in my post on TPM (I also attended a late 1993 intellectuals' dinner at the White House, where similar discussions occurred). The early 1995 meeting at Camp David was a many-hours-long seminar featuring about a dozen intellectuals plus a bunch of White House insiders, talking with Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. It was a fascinating window into how the Clintons were coping with the massive health care debacle and Congressional election defeats of late 1994.

I have gone back to my 1995 notes to check my recollections of the event. My notes do not have any exact words, so I am not going to try to corroborate a particular phrase from Hillary Clinton or any other speaker.

But what is clear in both in my memory and my notes is that there was extensive, hard-nosed discussion about why masses of voters did not support Clinton or trust government or base their choices on economic as opposed to what people saw as peripheral life-style concerns. Hillary Clinton was among the most cold-blooded analysts in attendance. She spoke of ordinary voters as if they were a species apart, and showed interest only in the political usefulness of their choices -- usefulness to the Clinton administration, that is.

I vividly remember at the time finding it impressive that Bill Clinton (not Hillary Clinton) showed real empathy for the ordinary people whose motives and supposedly misguided choices were under analysis. Ironically, just as Barber reported, Bill Clinton was the one who combined analysis and empathy, much as Obama himself did in his full San Francisco remarks.

much more from Theda Skocpol here

This seems entirely consistent with the campaign she has run. Too bad Bill couldn't rein her in. It seems he has learned the wrong lessons from the 90's and it's costing them both.