My old comrade Jonathan Alter is right. Symbolism matters. Psychology matters. Mood music matters. Both of my paternal grandparents were on the WPA payroll, so for them the fact that the New Deal "gave employment to a lot of workers who needed it" was pretty important. Alonzo Hamby knows as much about FDR as any man alive, but perhaps he needs to be reminded that the long-term costs of long-term unemployment are not just reflected in a shrinking GDP. (Maybe a refresher on the state of American private utility companies in the 1930s is in order as well. Just because Samuel Insull appears in Dos Passos's great trilogy USA doesn't make him a fictional character.)

Those of us in the fact-based community are deeply indebted to James Galbraith and Marshall Auerback for providing the statistics to rebut what has now become the prevailing orthodoxy about the New Deal and unemployment. (Though a look at the comments below Galbraith's contribution reveals how far we have to go.) Whether the New Deal moderated or ended the Depression seems to me less important than recognizing that, for those on the receiving end, even amelioration was no small matter.

If we now have a better sense of what the original New Deal accomplished, what can we hope for from a new New Deal? Nationalizing the banks, though it may become Wall Street's preferred means of escaping accountability for its failures (as it seems to fast be becoming the City of London's) is not in my view something that those of us on the left should be clamoring for (whatever our ideological forbears may have done). But there are plenty of measures, not all of them from the hundred days, well worth adapting to our own time, from reinstating something like Glass-Steagall to making it clear to American workers, once again, that "the president wants you to join a union." Infrastructure projects that not only keep Americans in work, but build a power transmission grid for the 21st century, and urban transportation systems less tied to fossil fuels, would be worthy successors to the TVA. And given how much my generation of historians owes the various WPA oral history projects it would be grand to see a new generation of documentation.

But surely the outpouring of national energy and optimism we saw on Tuesday should be able to imagine new fields of concerted national endeavor. Our country's landscape still benefits from the efforts of FDR and the CCC, but what about accelerating environmental cleanup, or healing the scars of strip-mining, or restoring the great Atlantic fisheries? Or a nationwide corps of kindergarten and nursery teachers to bring small class sizes and quality teaching to deprived areas? Or an Urban Energy Conservation Corps of young people to help turn our cities green?

In the end specific programs may be less important than keeping up the pressure for change and innovation and audacity. Obama does need an argument--in every sense of the word. Yes we need to know what we want from the new administration. But I.F. Stone liked to tell the story of FDR meeting with a group and telling them he agreed with their aims. Now they had to force him to act. Because the pressure to slow down, settle for less, and lower our expectations has already begun.