Clinton Lauds F.D.R., Assails Bureaucracy : Politics: At memorial gathering, President insists that Roosevelt would today move to limit the massive government he helped to create.

On the 50th anniversary of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Clinton asserted Wednesday that even his towering predecessor would today push to curtail the vast federal apparatus that he put in motion.

Speaking in front of Roosevelt’s clapboard home in this southwest Georgia hamlet, Clinton told a memorial gathering that the late President’s belief in government as “an instrument of democratic destiny” is now threatened by rising anti-government sentiment. Yet Clinton argued that F.D.R. today would be pushing for new limits to government’s reach.

“He would think it’s gone too far,” Clinton said. F.D.R. wanted government to protect the helpless and offer the fallen a “temporary respite,” he said. “He never meant for anybody to become totally dependent on the government when they could be doing things for themselves.”

Roosevelt, he insisted, “wouldn’t be defending everything we did 50 years ago. Do we need a big, centralized bureaucracy? Of course, we don’t. Should we reassert the importance of the values of self-reliance and independence? You bet we should.”

Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, just four months before the end of World War II.

Clinton’s pilgrimage to F.D.R.’s “Little White House” here, where the polio-stricken President sought relief in mineral-water therapy, was intended to add political punch to his long-running defense of activist government. Yet his speculations on F.D.R.’s views suggested Clinton’s belief that the anti-government passions must be acknowledged, even in celebrations of the Democrats’ most revered 20th-Century figure.

Clinton compared F.D.R.’s efforts for ordinary Americans to his own push for proposals offering tuition tax breaks. Because of their value in helping raise incomes, education tax breaks are “the most important tax cut we can have,” he said, warning that he would not support the GOP tax-cut bill unless it includes such benefits. However, he stopped short of a categorical promise of a veto.

It is not clear whether Republican legislation would meet Clinton’s demand. A House-passed bill would establish an “American-dream savings account,” a new type of individual retirement account that would allow withdrawal of money for several reasons, including certain expenses for higher education.

Clinton’s proposed tax legislation is more generous, offering up to $10,000 in deductions to offset post-secondary education and training costs.

The memorial ceremony brought a list of mostly Democratic notables to Warm Springs, from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young and former President Jimmy Carter.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the late President’s granddaughter, quoted an F.D.R. speech that contained descriptions of a long list of items that government owed its people, including his comments on “the right to a decent home,” and the “right to a good education,” and to health care and personal security.

Clinton said he deplored the way his Republican adversaries had inverted the Keynesian economics that F.D.R. used when he expanded government.

The 1980s, he said, was a time of “conservative Keynesianism--that is, blame the government and blame the past, but deficit-spend under the title of tax cuts and tilt the tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans because it is their investment that creates jobs.”

The huge federal budget deficits did spur growth, but they also “gave us the first permanent government deficit in the entire history of the United States. And the inequality among working people did not go away,” Clinton said. “Instead, it got worse.”

Today, he said, with tax-cut fever sweeping Washington, “we have to worry about how much and who gets it and what for.”