WASHINGTON – Europe’s economic crisis could send shock waves roaring across the Atlantic that would drag down the fragile U.S. economy and threaten President Barack Obama’s hopes for a second term. The president demonstrated Friday just how deeply he’s worried about that – and how little he can do to prevent it.

Obama used an impromptu news conference to prod European leaders to quickly and vigorously deal with their crisis. Along with that rare cross-Atlantic jawboning, he accused congressional Republicans at home of holding back a U.S. rebound.

The president held forth, unprompted, on what European leaders could and should do to fix their economic woes, although he insisted he was not “scolding them or telling them what to do.”