Senator Clinton told a banquet audience in Midtown last night that the fiscal priorities of the Bush administration are so skewed that it “almost makes me yearn for Ross Perot and his charts.”

In a speech before the Citizens Budget Commission at the Waldorf-Astoria, Mrs. Clinton drew a desolate picture of America’s fiscal health, appearing to foreshadow the main plank of her 2006 re-election campaign and perhaps a 2008 presidential run.

“The larger issue of where we are headed fiscally trumps everything,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Her speech came amid relatively positive economic news for the Bush administration. The Treasury Department reported Wednesday there will be a budget surplus for the April-to-June quarter, reversing previous predictions of continuing deficits. The government recorded a $412 billion deficit last year, the largest in history. Budget forecasters predict a slight narrowing of the deficit this fiscal year.

Positioning herself as a deficit hawk, Mrs. Clinton said she sometimes wonders if she lives in a “parallel universe to decision makers in Washington,” describing herself as a “realist” working against a tide of irresponsible spending.

“What’s particularly troubling is how untroubled most people in Washington seem to be,” she said in a speech that lasted about 30 minutes and occasionally drew prolonged applause from the audience.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group that analyzes state and city budgets, awarded Mrs. Clinton a medal for “high civic service.” She said she was embarrassed to accept the award because so many of her congressional arguments for stricter spending have been made in vain.

In a speech that barely touched on New York fiscal issues, Mrs. Clinton’s main theme was how the Bush administration was racking up deficits while failing to invest prudently in the future.

“There will be a day of reckoning, because we are living on borrowed time and borrowed money,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We are finding our choices beginning to shrink politically.”

She said Americans would look back on the fiscal decisions of the Bush administration 25 years from now and ask, “How did they let this happen? What were they thinking? What on earth happened to the United States of America?”

Citing examples, she said the Bush administration had turned its back on Amtrak and had failed to invest enough money in broadband Internet access.

With approval ratings near 70% and her campaign having taken in nearly $4 million in the first three months of 2005, Mrs. Clinton is in a strong position to win a second Senate term. She has kept quiet about her plans for a presidential bid, but other Democrats have said she is the front-runner for the 2008 nomination.

Late last month, Congress adopted a $2.56 trillion budget for 2006 and aimed to cut the federal deficit in half by 2010, with savings coming from Medicaid restructuring and extra revenue anticipated from opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.