"Politics," Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg declared during Harry Truman's presidency decades ago, "stops at the water's edge." Not, it turns out, for Mitt Romney. Three years ago, Romney blasted Obama's "apology tour" even as the President was visiting Cairo, Ankara and other capitals. (For that slander, the Washington Post fact-checker gave Romney a "Four Pinocchio" rating.) Now, the Republican nominee has dispatched his chief economic adviser Glenn Hubbard to pen an-op in a German paper to undermine the Obama administration's position on the economic crisis in Europe.

For months, the White House has been pressing Euro zone leaders and German chancellor Angela Merkel to take action to stabilize Spain and Greece while backing away from the draconian austerity programs that are dragging down European economies and threating the U.S. recovery. Even as Treasury Security Timothy Geithner pushed for the rescue of Spanish banks, President Obama used his press conference Friday to issue a warning:

Over the longer term, even as European countries with large debt burdens carry out necessary fiscal reforms, they've also got to promote economic growth and job creation. As some countries have discovered, it's a lot harder to rein in deficits and debt if your economy isn't growing. So it's a positive thing that the conversation has moved in that direction, and leaders like Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande are working to put in place a growth agenda alongside responsible fiscal plans.