The steel industry is lined up at the trough.

Its executives are waiting anxiously for details of President-elect Obama’s stimulus plan and adding their voices to pleas for a huge public investment program — up to $1 trillion over two years — that will lift demand for steel to build highways, bridges, power grids, schools, hospitals, water-treatment plants and rapid transit.

“What we are asking,” said Daniel R. DiMicco, chairman and CEO of Nucor, a giant steelmaker with a Seattle plant, “is that our government deal with the worst economic slowdown in our lifetime through a recovery program that has in every provision a ‘buy America’ clause.”

I predict that Obama’s Raw Deal will dwarf FDR’s New Deal.