WASHINGTON — Anyone who wonders whether Hillary Clinton still salivates about becoming the first woman President in 2017 wasn’t in her audience at Syracuse University last week.
Clad in a fiery red blazer and pearls with her hair in a ponytail, the secretary of state was on campus for a “conversation” with students sponsored by the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, whose dean happens to be James Steinberg, her former deputy.
Steinberg’s friendly questions elicited a tour d’horizon of Hillary’s diplomatic world, showcasing an impressive grasp of her portfolio leavened with crowd-pleasing asides — like trying to persuade a Third World leader it’s not cool to consider capital punishment for LGBTs.
Hillary’s real sizzle, however, emerged at the very end.
Emulating a longstanding tradition of her predecessors, she will sit out the fall election. That hardly means she’s disinterested — or has lost her political zest.
Just before exiting the stage to work the crowd, the former First Lady showed a little partisan leg, delivering an understated but withering putdown of Republican trickle-down economics.
She never mentioned the GOP, let alone Mitt Romney, but there was no mistaking the target of her veiled barbs when she pleaded for a robust political debate grounded in “fact-based” dialogue instead of theology.
“Let’s not pretend you can keep cutting taxes and end our deficit and debt,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you have to agree with the solutions (but) we need to be very honest about what the facts are.
“After you look at the arithmetic . . . you realize, you know what — cutting taxes is not going to produce huge amounts of revenue,” she added.
“We tried that in the ’80s. It didn’t work so well. My husband had a different idea. He kind of understood arithmetic, and (said) okay, we’ve got to do a little of this and a little of that. And we got a balanced budget and a surplus.
Hillary says she isn’t interested in running for President again. But as her boss would say, let’s be clear: The flame still burns.
tdefrank@nydailynews.com
