Comparing the Clintons to FDR is crazy in my book.

[YoungDemCA]

40. "FDR wasn't FDR - until his hand was forced by civil disobedience"

Similarly, (Howard) Zinn said in 2008:

The obstacles are a kind of resignation that things will go on as before. That's always the obstacle to change. The obstacle to change is not that people don't want change. People want change. But most of the time, people feel impotent. However, at certain points in history, the energy level of people, the indignation level of people rises. And at that point it becomes possible for people to organize and to agitate and to educate one another, and to create an atmosphere in which the government must do something. I'm thinking of the 1930s; I'm thinking of Franklin D. Roosevelt coming into office not really a crusader.

Roosevelt came into office, you know, with a balance-the-budgets history. It was not clear what he was going to do, and I don't think he was clear about what he was going to do, except that he was going to be different from Hoover and the Republicans. But when he came into office, he faced a country that was on strike. He faced general strikes in San Francisco in Minneapolis. He faced strikes of hundreds of thousands of textile workers in the South. He faced a tenants movement and an unemployed council movement. And he faced a country in turmoil, and he reacted to it, he was sensitive to it, he moved. That's what we will need.
We will need to see some of the scenes that we saw in the '30s.

snip:

And Peter Dreier - professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College - wrote last year:

In his recent book Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America, Adam Cohen [assistant editorial page editor of the New York Times] points out that when FDR was elected in November 1932, and even after he took office in March 1933, his ideas about what to do were very unclear.

He promised Americans a "New Deal," but he had very few specifics. In fact, FDR was in many ways a cautious, even conservative, politician. The one clear idea he had in mind when he took office was to cut the federal budget, and the person he hired to do that job was his budget director, a conservative Congressman from Arizona named Lewis Douglas. He was also initially reluctant to use the power of government to regulate business practices, create jobs or to support union organizing or struggling farmers. He was clear from the beginning, however, that core values were at stake--articulated in his first Inaugural Address. That is what created the ground--and support--for his pragmatic experimentation.

Cohen's book describes an ongoing battle for FDR's heart and mind that took place both inside and outside the White House.

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/11/fdr-wasnt-fdr-until-his-hand-was-forced.html