Former KC Mayor Kay Barnes tries to sell her small-town roots in her run for Congress

A couple of Amish guys ride a horse-powered hayrack past the snow-covered town square in Stanberry, Missouri. The town of 1,243 people is 94 miles north of Kansas City, but it might as well be a century away. The horses trot past a Dollar General Store, a pizza parlor and a local shop that sells T-shirts and cell phones. It's Valentine's Day, and Kay Barnes, the former mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, has a date to speak about her northwest Missouri roots.

Barnes and longtime campaign strategist Steve Glorioso were supposed to pick me up at 10 a.m. in Stanberry before moving on to Albany. Barnes is running for Missouri's 6th Congressional District seat, which represents parts of 26 counties from the rural northwest corner of the state to Kansas City's northern and eastern suburbs. A few minutes late, Barnes arrives in her campaign manager's black Chevrolet Impala. The smiling candidate hops out of the car. She wears gold hoop earrings, glasses, brown slacks and a turtleneck under a coat of muted colors. Her voice rises an octave. "Hiiiiiiiiiii, Justin," she says. We've never met, but Barnes is so friendly, I worry that we have and I've forgotten.

A year after her final term as Kansas City mayor, Barnes has left the country clubs for the northwest Missouri country. Barnes, a Democrat who lives in the upscale Kansas City development of Briarcliff, is counting on her family's roots to court rural northwest Missouri voters and unseat conservative Republican Sam Graves.

Barnes isn't the only one counting on small-town street cred. Graves' homespun shtick is already playing out as his campaign contrasts his plaid-shirt-and-blue-jeans-wearing farmhand to Barnes' city girl.

Back in Stanberry, we pack into the Impala for the ride to Albany, where her mother lived for 20 years. A GPS box stuck to the windshield spits out directions as Barnes' campaign manager, Corey Platt, drives past silos, open fields and farmhouses. Glorioso rides shotgun. Barnes takes the backseat. Her political polish is immediately clear; Barnes is well-rehearsed and guarded.

Unprompted, Barnes sells her "strong family roots." Her great-great-grandfather homesteaded in the 1800s in northwest Missouri — "Missourah," she says Her great-grandfather, a blacksmith, lived in the same area near the town of Skidmore. Her grandfather ran a Chevy garage in Maitland. "I say garage because at that time, they weren't called dealerships — they were called garages," Barnes says. Her grandfather would drive to Kansas City to pick up cars to sell in Maitland.

Her parents, Helen Morford and Fritz Cronkite, met at Northwest Missouri State in Maryville. "My father was a high school football and basketball coach part of the time that I was growing up in St. Jo," Barnes says. "So I learned X's and O's before I learned the alphabet."

Years after Barnes' father died, Barnes' mother remarried and moved to Albany. "There may be some people here this morning that knew my mother," Barnes says. Now, her 95-year-old mother lives in St. Joseph.

Barnes' departure from the city is apparent in every facet of her campaign against Graves, the four-term congressman from tiny Tarkio, a farm town located about 15 minutes east of Interstate 29 in the extreme northwest corner of the state. Barnes' countrified campaign literature shows her leaning against a wooden fence in an open field. "She revitalized a troubled city," the card reads, showing pictures of praise-filled newspaper articles above an image of the gleaming Sprint Center, "by relying on her roots in rural Northwest Missouri." Photographs on the card show Barnes' childhood home in St. Joseph; the school where her father coached; and Barnes with her mother, daughter and granddaughter.

On the car ride to Albany, Barnes defends using her roots.

"This is the area with which I'm very familiar," Barnes says. "My family background is here. I spent all the time I was growing up — and much of the time as an adult — spending a lot of time in the district.

"There is a great restaurant, for example, in Bethany. Whenever I would visit my mother and her second husband, we would go over to Bethany for the buffet. It was the biggest buffet that I've seen in my life," she says. "It's called, this isn't exactly it, but it's something like Hoot Toot."

I ask if she's thinking of the Toot Toot.

"That's it!" Barnes says, excited. "Are you familiar with the Toot Toot? It's just amazing. It's been a few years since I've been there, but it's amazing. It's just amazing."

The mention of the Toot Toot seems to have lowered Barnes' guard for a moment. Then she snaps back on message.

Platt takes a wrong turn and ends up on a short driveway behind the Albany community center.

"There's a better way to get in," Barnes cracks. "I don't know where it is."

Platt swings the car around, backtracks and finally finds the entrance. A handful of cars are in the lot.

Barnes theorizes that rural people are no different from those who live in cities.

"I don't have to change anything about myself to be with them, to talk with them, work with them," she says. "Whatever. I just don't."