Sit-Down in Chicago

When Barack Obama revealed after the election that he was reading a book on Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days as president, the "new New Deal" discussion went into overdrive. Progressives dared to believe that Obama's presidency might, due to economic necessity and the president-elect's interventionist inclinations, be a reprise of the last extended period when economic fairness was on the agenda.

But there will be no new New Deal if Americans wait for Obama to lead them out of the domestic quagmire into which Bill Clinton and George W. Bush steered the country with a toxic blend of free-trade absolutism, banking deregulation and disdain for industrial and agricultural planning. Just as a well-inclined but cautious Roosevelt needed the prodding of mass movements and militancy to talk the Washington establishment into accepting radical shifts in the economic order, so Obama will need to be able to point to some turbulence at the grassroots.

Remarkably, even before Obama takes office, a plant-closing struggle in his hometown has developed into just the sort of fight that is needed. More remarkably, Obama is responding as FDR might have. After Bank of America--which is expected to pocket as much as $25 billion via Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's Wall Street bailout--refused to extend operating credit to Republic Windows & Doors, a Chicago-based manufacturer, the firm disregarded federal rules that require sixty days notice of a plant closing and announced that its factory would be shuttered December 5. But instead of going home to a dismal holiday season like hundreds of thousands of other newly unemployed workers, Republic's employees occupied the factory.

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