“Unions have played a very important role historically in balancing in some cases the egregious actions of some employers and have been important to the development of our economy,” Romney told a town hall meeting in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire on Tuesday morning. (snip) “There are some unions that continue to train their workers effectively, their members effectively,” Romney said. “But in some cases, if you will the union bosses — the union CEOs that are running the unions — perhaps put the interests of themselves ahead of the interests of their workers. And that may have been what happened in South Carolina.”

Despite the moderately positive surface of these comments, there are a minimum of three anti-union tactics on display here.

1) Unions are important historically. You know, in the past. This lets Romney seem to be saying something positive while implying that unions have outlived their usefulness. When in fact, we know that union mines are safer, as measured by traumatic injury and fatality rates, than non-union mines like Upper Big Branch, where they kept two sets of safety records; that collective bargaining raises wages, especially for women and people of color, that companies routinely fire workers for union activity. It is all too clear that without the watchdog role unions play on occupational safety and health laws and other laws to protect all workers, corporations would immediately act to gut the effectiveness of those protections.

2) Talking about "union bosses" or "union CEOs" attempts to put the democratically-elected leaders of unions at the same level as corporate CEOs making tens of millions of dollars per year as their corporations rake in enormous profits, pay little in taxes, and don't create jobs.

3) The payoff. Romney intends to add weight to his criticism of the NLRB's complaint against Boeing by having said ostensibly positive things about unions leading up to it. "I'm not anti-union; I just think they're wrong this time" is on par with "some of my best friends are black." And it's a non sequitur. The NLRB, an independent federal agency, made this complaint, not a union leader seeking some unspecified personal advancement.

Whatever the political calculation Multiple Choice Mitt was making with these remarks, his real record is that he called the Employee Free Choice Act "catastrophic," sent money to help Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker eliminate collective bargaining for public employees, and has jumped on other anti-union opportunities like criticizing the UAW in the auto bailout.