JEFFREY BROWN:

And now two people who have followed these events closely.

Linda Chavez is chairwoman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank, and author of "Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics." And Kate Bronfenbrenner is director of labor education research at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and editor of the book "Global Unions."

Well, Kate Bronfenbrenner, let me start with you.

This was clearly a loss for the UAW and organized labor, but how big was it and do you see anything positive for the unions to take from it?

KATE BRONFENBRENNER, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University: I think people are making more of this loss than they should.

It was a close election. and it wasn't a surprising loss, given that this was, as we see in many campaigns, a campaign where a union went in expecting to have neutrality, and ended up with an opposition campaign, a fairly aggressive opposition campaign, not from the employer, but from political figures and the business committee — business community that was, in effect, the same as an employer opposition campaign.

The problem was, the union didn't run the kind of campaign that is needed when you have opposition.