The Los Angeles Times reviews how anti-card check forces organized and persuaded Red state Democrats like Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor to oppose the bill:

Today, thanks to those and other defections, key components of the bill are in serious jeopardy. And the legislation has produced one of the biggest surprises in Washington since Democrats swept the White House and Congress: The nation’s labor unions, which organized so effectively last year to help elect President Obama, have been outmaneuvered so far on their top priority by their opponents in the business community.

“We were outspent, outhustled and outorganized,” said one chagrined union advisor who was not authorized to speak by name.

Missing from the Times’s report, however, is any discussion of the reason anti-card check forces have been so successful: the key components of the bill (i.e., effective repeal of the secret ballot and forced arbitration of new union contracts) are anathema to most Americans. Big Labor wasn’t simply “outhustled”; it was pushing a grossly overreaching bill that offended Americans’ sense of fairness. Take away the secret ballot? Have a government-appointed arbitrator tell the bargaining parties what contract they will have? Well, it’s no wonder the proponents didn’t want to talk about the specifics of the bill.

Couple this with Big Labor choosing to push this issue during a recession — when employers are laying off millions of workers — and the image was firmly established that whatever Big Labor was pushing was not in the interest of average workers and certainly was not going to help the economy at large.

This isn’t to say that Big Labor will fold its tent and go away. So long as Arlen Specter is in the Senate, there will be efforts to craft a “compromise.” But the legislative lesson is inescapable. Some ideas are so awful and unsustainable that it doesn’t matter how much a special-interest group has ponied up to elect a sympathetic president and Congress.