Mitt Romney has a new Web graphic up with a Boston Globe quote that says, “Romney was at his best in crisis mode.” I thought this was a little odd, kind of like seeing “Rudy Giuliani for President” in the NY Times.

Here’s a screenshot:

I’m really not sure why Romney is pointing to the article and using it in ads. When you go to the actual article, it’s not exactly pro-Romney. It’s titled, “Ambitious goals; shifting stances” and starts out with this:

After his failure to elect more Republican legislators in the 2004 campaign, Mitt Romney met with the Globe’s editorial board and made a surprising declaration: No longer could he put so much time into promoting his party.
’’From now on, it’s me-me-me,’’ he said.
Within weeks of the election, Romney issued a plea for bipartisanship and laid out his vision for what would become a defining achievement. In a Globe op-ed piece headlined ‘’My Plan for Massachusetts Health Insurance Reform,’’ he unveiled a novel approach to providing health care for everyone.
The initial response fell somewhere between skepticism and incredulity.
’’This administration hasn’t been willing to work with anyone,’’ Christine E. Canavan, then House vice chairwoman of the Joint Committee on Health Care, said at the time. ‘’I just came out of a campaign where the man was trying to make sure I wasn’t here any more.’’
Within two days, though, Romney got a bracing response from an unlikely quarter. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion who turned back Romney’s freshman venture into politics in 1994, offered emphatic encouragement. One of the great champions of universal coverage saw promise in Romney’s gambit.

And here’s the part about Romney in “crisis mode”:

Many other observers say Romney was at his best in crisis mode, taking charge of an issue and seeing it through to resolution. At other times, though, Romney seemed conscious of little other than political image.

Eeeh. Again, I’m not really sure why Romney would put this quote on his page, as it leads to an article that reinforces so much of what scares a lot of Republican voters away from his candidacy. The article actually gets worse for Romney, especially with his new focus on how he’ll fix the economy:

Romney’s reason for rejecting the initiative – that he wanted to protect jobs – was consistent with a major promise of his 2002 campaign, during which he declared: ‘’My program for creating jobs is second to none in the entire history of this state.’’
But Romney inherited a sluggish economy. Hammered by a collapse in some technology sectors, Massachusetts lost 205,100 jobs, or about 6 percent of its workforce between February 2001 and December 2003, the end of his first year in office.
The climate improved, but by the end of Romney’s term, the state had generated only 24,400 net new jobs, a 0.8 percent increase and the fourth-weakest rate of job growth among all states over that time, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com, an independent research group.

Not a very good portrait all the way around.