From a former Delta flight attendant to the mother of a fallen Iraq Navy SEAL, the activists and organizers aboard the Tea Party Express each seem to represent a slice of America.

By Cristina Corbin – FOXNews.com

From a former Delta flight attendant to the mother of a fallen Iraq Navy SEAL, the activists and organizers aboard the Tea Party Express each seem to represent a slice of America.

Travelers on the tour, a three-bus caravan barnstorming the country in protest of the Washington establishment, claim to be brought together by common principles: small government, less spending and a fierce defense of individual freedom.

But a lot of Americans hold those values. So who are these people who drop everything to spend weeks on the road on a bus talking about the Constitution and turning ’60s-style activism on its head?

Some are folksy, some are strictly business. Everyday Americans make up the bulk of those on board and at the rallies, but there’s also a strong organizing factor that makes the cross-country tour, which is on its third run and starting to carry some political heft, what it is.

By some appearances, the highly coordinated rallies and pulse of the 42-city national bus tour have all the markings of a political campaign.

Staff members work 18-hour days, seven days a week, and the chief strategist behind the group, Sal Russo, is a longtime Republican consultant from California who began his political career as a personal aide to Ronald Reagan.

Russo, who is head of the Sacramento-based political action committee, Our Country Deserves Better, which is funding the bus tour, has 40 years of political consulting under his belt. In the mid-1980s, Russo joined forces with former Reagan campaign director Ed Rollins to start a political consulting firm, which took on clients like former Republican vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp.

“It has all the intensity of a campaign, but more like an old-fashioned one,” Russo said of his group as the bus rolled along a stretch of highway en route from Arkansas to Mississippi. “We don’t have a high-paid staff.”

“The Tea Partiers remind me very much of the Reagan crowds of 1966,” he added. “But this is a movement, not a party.”

The Tea Party Express set off on its first national tour last August to protest the tax-and-spend policies of Congress and to cement its message with the thousands of other Tea Party factions that had formed around the country, said Joe Wierzbicki, one of the group’s founding members.

The second bus tour launched in October, largely as an effort to debunk rumors that the Tea Party movement was nothing more than a passing fad.

This time around, Wierzbicki said, the purpose of the “Just Vote Them Out” tour is more exact: “To start putting together the campaigns that will change who’s in office in 2010.”

He added. “And health care has created the perfect storm for that.”

FULL STORY

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