Greensburg — In just his second public appearance on behalf of Mitt Romney (and his first in Pennsylvania), former GOP presidential candidate and Senator Rick Santorum spoke to a crowd of about 75 at a Westmoreland County office grand opening for Senate candidate Tom Smith.

“We must rally behind and do everything we possibly can to support Governor Mitt Romney so he’s the next president of the United States,” Santorum said.

“…if Pennsylvania goes Republican, Mitt Romney will be the next president of the United States. It can happen.”

The office opening is part of a concerted push by the PAGOP in conjunction with the RNC and the Romney campaign to expand its field program. The party held a similar opening on Saturday with Sen. Pat Toomey in Conshohocken, Montgomery County. After these plus three opened last weekend, the GOP’s total is now 20. Dems and the Obama campaign have 30 offices in PA.

Santorum stressed the importance of the election as the “most critical” of the audience’s lifetime, and said that Obama has become “drunk on power” and desires to overturn the work of Congress and bully the Supreme Court into giving in to his policy demands.

After his remarks, Santorum was asked about his principle attack on Romney – that he was uniquely unqualified to challenge the President on health care.

“I said on the issue of healthcare [Romney] would have trouble, and I think he’s had a little trouble coming out of the gate on this issue,” Santorum said. “But the bottom line is that he is far better than Barack Obama on this issue.”

Tom Balya, a former Democratic County Commissioner from Westmoreland County said in a press release from PA Democrats that Romney’s inaction on releasing tax filings shows his dishonesty in voters in the County.

“The folks here in Westmoreland deserve to know the truth about Romney’s record and all this hiding makes me think there’s still more about his time at the corporate buyout firm that he doesn’t want Pennsylvania voters to know about,” Balya said.

Santorum pointed specifically to a move by Obama earlier this week to change the work requirement for welfare recipients, as part of a bill passed with bipartisan support in 1996 under Bill Clinton, and a bill Santorum said he wrote large parts of.

The 1996 reform required recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to work or seek work, take classes or undergo drug and alcohol counseling. Obama officials have said that the move isn’t to create dependency, but to give more leeway to the states to make their own decisions and distribute money. But Santorum doesn’t see it that way.

He said that the President is creating a dependency culture, “and he’s doing it against the law.”

Westmoreland County

Westmoreland’s star is on the rise in state GOP circles. Indeed, Romney is scheduled to visit the County on Tuesday for a rally at the Horizontal Wireline Services in Irwin.

Long a bastion of working class Democrats in western PA, the County has swung decisively Republican in the past five years. The party won virtually every competitive race, including three state House seats and every countywide office – the first time in over 5 decades that the GOP has held a majority on the County Commission.

It’s also one of the few counties to give a wider margin of victory to John McCain in 2008 (16.7 percent) than it did to George W. Bush in 2004 (12.5 percent).

In the presidential primary, held two weeks after Santorum officially left the race, the County mirrored perfectly the 58 percent of the vote Romney won statewide in Pennsylvania.

U.S. Senate

However, in 2006, Westmoreland voters contributed to an historic loss for Santorum in his U.S. Senate re-election bid when they voted for Bob Casey by a 7-point margin.

The man hoping to regain the seat for the GOP, Tom Smith, spoke as well. As did Washington County Commissioner and candidate for PA Treasurer Diana Irey Vaughan, PA Senator Kim Ward, and newly elected Westmoreland Co. GOP Chair Jill Cooper.

“We know that hardworking Americans, allowed to keep more of their hard-earned money, and allowed to dream big dreams are the path to prosperity,” said Smith. “These are the principles our country was founded on, and these are the values that have made this country great.”

Santorum made it clear that he’s pulling for Smith.

“Tom Smith is a good man. Like Mitt Romney, a solid businessman who understands how to make things work and understands that government isn’t the answer to our problems,” Santorum said.

Afterward, he called Casey hypocritical for his 2006 campaign attack that Santorum was a rubber stamp for former President George W. Bush.

“Casey voted with Obama at a higher percentage than I voted for Bush and yet I was the rubber stamp?” Santorum said. “You got a radical in Barack Obama and you have Bob Casey, who said he was going to be a moderate Democrat, who is equally radical as Barack Obama. It’s pretty sad.”