Steven Greenhouse on the election

Steven Greenhouse, writing in The New York Times about labor unions and the election:

Most labor leaders viewed Mr. Trump far more harshly than his union backers did; they often attacked him as a con artist and a threat to unions and workers. Mrs. Clinton would have prevailed had she adopted a more muscular pro-worker message, union leaders lament, more like Bernie Sanders’s message attacking trade deals and inequality.

There’s something sadly funny about the idea of trying to shape a candidate to resemble another candidate whom you’ve already chosen not to support. I can think of only one candidate who could have persuasively offered a message more like Bernie Sanders’s message: Bernie Sanders.

I remain deeply disappointed that my union, the American Federation of Teachers, endorsed Hillary Clinton without even pretending to go through the motions of weighing candidates’ strengths and weaknesses. Background here.

[Without even pretending to go through the motions? That’s what I mean: without even pretending to pretend.]