Harvard’s Theda Skocpol recalls Hillary Clinton’s deep connection with ordinary working-class voters circa 1995:

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.

I think this whole angle of “gotcha” politics about snippets of speech transposed from one context to another is ridiculous and pathological for democracy in America — and I cannot fathom why the Clintons or George Stephanopoulos are descending to this dirt, not to mention the guilt-by-association crap. It is particularly despicable of them to criticize Obama for the sort of observation/analysis that was routine in and around the 1990s Clinton White House. And I cannot help but feel there is a psychological edge of pure envy in Bill Clinton’s attacks: Obama is empathetic and charismatic as well as smart, just like Bill was back then, in those so much better days!

I doubt Theda Skocpol remembers me — I have not really had any occasion to contact her since leaving grad school — but her “American Political Development” seminar class was quite crucial to me at the point when I was just starting to write my dissertation. Not that it is easy to tell that in terms of how my work has evolved; I was the only student doing anything remotely early American in that class, but it was very bracing and helpful to encounter some other scholars with broad interests in American politics, an article that seemed to be in short supply among the historians I had met up to that point.

Skocpol was also quite a Clinton fan/fellow traveler back in the 90s, so her take on Hillary’s late conversion to ersatz lunch bucket politics really means something.