ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Hillary Rodham Clinton said the nation’s political leaders could use some time at adult sleepaway camp to learn how to cooperate across the partisan divide and decried the nation’s “huge fun deficit” during a speech Thursday to a conference of professionals who run children’s summer camps.

“The red cabin and the blue cabin have to come together and actually listen to each other,” Clinton told about 3,000 attendees at the Tri-State Camp Conference, run by the American Camp Association of New York and New Jersey.

It may have been Clinton’s last paid appearance before she declares her candidacy for president, which aides have signaled could come as early as next month. In an hour on stage, she reminisced about a childhood scrape with a bully, talked about her love of the outdoors, praised summer camp and admitted she was a binge-watcher of the Netflix drama “House of Cards.”

But her path forward was never far away, and Clinton used the occasion to preview what is shaping up as a campaign theme: finding consensus and ending partisan gridlock.

“If you don’t build relationships with people and all you do is show up to argue or show up to point fingers, you can’t get anything done,” Clinton said.

She recalled reaching out, as a new senator from New York, to then-Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and then-President George W. Bush, to get recovery money for the city after the 9-11 attacks. And during her husband’s administration, the former first lady said, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., would “stand up and say the worst things about Bill and sometimes me,” but he would still come over to the family quarters of the White House to work out compromises with the president.

It’s hard for members of Congress to get to know one another and build productive relationships given the “insatiable pressure” to raise “insane” amounts of money, Clinton said. The Supreme Court made it worse with the “Citizens United” decision, she said to applause.

Not to mention, Clinton said, “you are under 24/7 scrutiny and everybody is leaking and talking,” and the media thrive on conflict-driven stories.