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.
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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.”
In early February, I called longtime Graves consultant Jeff Roe about tagging along with the congressman in the district. Roe was in California working on Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign. He said February was a busy month for Graves. In early April, Roe told me to call Jason Klindt, who had taken over the campaign. Klindt told me that April was a busy month for the congressman. Klindt suggested I might have an interview on April 30 but didn’t call back to confirm.
On April 21, with the prospect appearing to dwindle of seeing Graves in person, I dropped in on Graves’ “Mobile Office Tour” stop in at the courthouse in Parkville. Graves’ e-newsletter didn’t advertise an appearance by the congressman but offered a chance to speak with one of Graves’ staff members. In the newsletter, Graves wrote: “I have always believed you learn more by listening than talking. My priority in Congress is constituent service and the Mobile Office is an additional opportunity for me to stay in contact with the people of the Sixth District. I encourage everyone to come by these informal sessions to discuss their views or receive assistance with federal agencies.”
The capacity of the Parkville courtroom is 141 people. Buffy Smith, a field representative with Sam Graves’ Liberty office who has worked for the congressman for four years, sits alone. I ask if Graves usually comes to these events. “Generally, no,” she says. Smith makes small talk about her summer haircut and about growing up in Bethany. Her BlackBerry Curve vibrates every few minutes, and she taps responses on the keypad. Mostly, the room remains uncomfortably silent.
Smith tells me that she’s “not authorized” to speak with the media. She gives me the name of another staffer to call.
Five minutes before 9 a.m., Smith calls it quits.
Graves doesn’t appear at his mobile offices, so I look up his official biography on his Web site. The bio builds him up as a man of northwestern Missouri. He’s a sixth-generation family farmer. He won his first run for public office in 1992, a seat in the Missouri House. Graves and Roe forged their alliance two years later, in a successful state Senate race. Roe then managed Graves’ successful 2000 bid for Congress. Graves easily won re-election in 2002, 2004 and 2006.
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In early May, Graves launched his first TV ads, which attack Barnes’ “San Francisco-style values.” The ads criticize Barnes for “a ritzy California fundraiser,” hosted by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and for appearing on the cover of Camp, a Kansas City magazine that covers gay issues. In one ad, the narrator says: “The Kansas City Gay Pride Club supports Kay Barnes’ agenda to make same-sex marriage the law in Missouri.”
Barnes answered with her own television ads that called Graves “Exxon’s congressman” for taking more than $50,000 from big oil companies, according to the spots.
Barnes dismisses criticism that she’s out of touch with rural voters, giving a nearly identical response every time. “Well, that’s just what they do … but I laugh at that because nothing could be further from the truth.” She says she’s prepared for the worst, citing Roe’s admission to The Kansas City Star that he has dug through his political opponents’ trash. “I have a shredder,” Barnes says. “I use it every day.”
Barnes stands inside the door of the Albany community center’s meeting room like a Wal-Mart greeter, welcoming potential supporters. Compared with Stanberry, Albany is an entertainment mecca, with a movie theater, athletic fields, a nine-hole golf course and a community center.
Barnes opens the meeting by talking about her mother. After Barnes’ father died, her mother married a college friend named Dale St. John and moved to Albany.
“I think I can still drive to where she used to live,” Barnes tells the room. “I may have to go to the highway and work my way back, but I think I can do that.”
Then she gets down to business. She wants to start “a dialogue” about the challenges and opportunities in Albany. Barnes talks about the economy, job creation and health care. She says if she wins, she’ll hire a staff member who is an expert in rural economic development to work with communities such as Albany.
“My opponent will make every effort to say that I’m a big-city mayor who knows nothing about nor cares about the rest of the district,” Barnes says. “They’ve already begun to beat that drum. I laugh when I hear that because nothing could be further from the truth.”
Barnes tells her family’s story nearly word for word the way she told it in the car on the way here. “My grandfather had the Chevy garage in Maitland,” Barnes says. “And you know, it didn’t used to be a dealership. It was a garage. And he would drive on the dirt roads down from Maitland down to Kansas City to pick up a couple of cars to bring them back to Maitland for sale.”
She tailors her narrative to the locals: After Fritz Cronkite’s death, Helen Cronkite married St. John, whom she had met at Northwest Missouri State. “She’s now 95,” Barnes says of her mother. “Lives in St. Jo. Is living alone. Has a dog. So she wanted me to tell many of you hello. She still speaks very fondly about her time here in Albany.”
She takes questions, and the people rattle off challenges: the rising cost of higher education, the No Child Left Behind Act, transportation, the water supply, blight, lack of jobs. Barnes nods along. She wants to hear about Albany’s assets — the children, the hospital, the golf course, the community center, the low crime rate, the quality of life.
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“There may not be easy answers, but what I want to say to you today is, I look forward to working with you on this,” Barnes says. “I want to do that. We can have some conversations during the campaign about this in more detail. And if I don’t end up getting elected, then maybe I’ll just come and hang out with you.”
The line draws laughs from the room.
After the speech, a satisfied Barnes sits with me in the meeting room while her campaign staff huddles around a laptop across the table and pecks out a press release. I ask her what she was like growing up.
“What was I like?” Barnes pauses. “I think I was curious. Loved sports, mainly because of my father’s influence, having been a coach.”
Barnes was an only child who, in her school days, was a member of the National Honor Society, a class treasurer and a cheerleader. She learned to play golf at age 10. She lights up when she talks about decorating the family home for Christmas. “I was given carte blanche to decorate anyway that I wanted to,” she says.
Barnes graduated from Central High School in St. Joseph in 1956 and earned a degree in secondary education from the University of Kansas. She married Doug Waldo, raised two kids in Brookside and taught in the Shawnee Mission School District. After 12 years of marriage, Barnes and Waldo divorced. Barnes served a four-year term on the Jackson County Legislature and then won a seat on the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council. She received a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Missouri-Kansas City before meeting a man from Chicago named Frank Barnes. They married and moved to the Windy City for four years, from 1988 to about 1992. When Frank Barnes retired, they moved back to Kansas City. Frank Barnes died in June 2000, a year after she became mayor of Kansas City. A year and a half later, Barnes moved north of the river to Briarcliff — back into the 6th District.
Glorioso and Platt head for the door. Barnes is the last to leave. She has a lunch meeting, but she wants to make a detour. She wants to see if she can find her mother’s former home.
“Which way are we going on the highway?” Platt asks.
“Right,” Barnes directs. Platt turns onto U.S. Highway 136 toward New Hampton.
“Go kind of slow,” Barnes says. “You’re going to make a right. Not yet. Uh, just keep going.”
Platt misses the turn.
“Oh, that was it,” Barnes says. “I think you can maybe turn right here. We can backtrack. Probably easier to turn around.”
Platt pulls into an empty lot and swings around.
“Up here, just beyond the Hy-Vee, make a left,” Barnes says. “Right here. Yep, right here.”
Platt follows the road into a residential area. Snow blankets the front yards. A stray dog wanders across the street.
“In the next block. Not this block but the next one,” Barnes says. “OK, kind of slow down. It’s this second one. Right here. Yeah.”
Barnes is looking at a gray, ranch-style home with new siding and an archway over the front door.
“It looks different,” Barnes says. “That front is new. It was flat before.”
Later, over lunch at Gambino’s Pizza in Stanberry, I ask Glorioso why Barnes talks up her family but rarely talks about herself.
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“Kay’s ego is totally in check,” Glorioso says. “She seldom says ‘I.’ She believes in collaborations.”
I ask him about the country routine. Glorioso says Barnes is being herself.
“She really does have a lot more country in her than people realize,” he says.
Jason Klindt, of the Graves campaign, never called me about tagging along with the congressman. So in early May, I call him to follow up.
Klindt says Congress ended up staying in session longer than expected, and a couple of events were canceled after a tornado ripped through the Northland.
“And to be honest with you,” Klindt continues, “you guys showed up at the mobile office, and I heard about that and it kind of creeped me out.” Klindt says I showed up unannounced. He says he has “seen stories The Pitch has written before” that have made him wonder why I was there.
I explain that Graves’ office sent The Pitch a press release about the event, so it seemed like it would be open to the public.
“Well, it is. I don’t care if you go,” Klindt says. “So I thought you were writing a story about that, to be honest with you. So I was like, I guess they’re not interested in doing that.”
Klindt says he’ll check Graves’ schedule. He says Graves will be traveling during his break from Congress at the end of May. “I’m not going to promise you a ride-along.”
On May 28, Ryan Steusloff, Graves’ communications director, explains that the congressman will be in Kearney and Excelsior Springs. I’m invited to attend two events, but I cannot ride with the congressman in between because Graves will be taking a call from the mayor of Cameron. They’ll be discussing the fact that about a dozen people in the town of 6,500 have been diagnosed with brain tumors in the last seven months. Steusloff says that after a press conference at the Midwest National Air Center in Excelsior Springs, Graves will grant me an interview for 15 to 20 minutes.
On May 29, Graves is one of the first in line at the Kearney Rotary Club’s Chinese buffet. Graves is in a hurry. He has to be at the Midwest National Air Center in an hour for the dedication of its instrument landing system. In 2004, Graves scored a $950,000 congressional appropriation for the new equipment. Graves wolfs down his food but leaves a half-eaten egg roll on his plate. He takes his Diet Pepsi to the front of the room and gives a quick speech.
A wiry man with a deep-lined face and closely cropped dark hair, Graves wears a white shirt and a red tie with Dockers. He defends his votes against several energy bills, which he says were “full of garbage.” He says he likes wind-power tax credits, but other earmarks have turned him off.
“There was an earmark in there for electric hybrid police cars for Hollywood, California,” Graves says with contempt. “There was an earmark in there for a rainforest — an indoor rainforest — in Iowa. To study the effects of rainforests in Iowa.”
The audience laughs.
“This was my favorite,” Graves says sarcastically. “There was an earmark in there for $3 million to promote Al Gore’s book in our schools. You know, the one about global warming. That was in the energy bill that everybody touted as such a wonderful thing and how evil everyone was who voted against it because it had wind-energy tax credits in it.”
Graves says he butts heads with the oil companies because he supports biodiesel and ethanol. “I fight the oil companies on this every day,” Graves says. “It’s part of the reason that we don’t get along so well.”
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The congressman takes some questions, then says he has to run. “I’m getting the hook. I apologize,” he says. “Anything you need, just call me. I’m home every week.”
Graves grabs his blazer, and his five handlers whisk him out of the room. A young aide in a suit drives Graves in a silver Jeep to the airport.
In the empty hangar, Graves works the space like a fundraiser, shaking every hand and making small talk with older white men in suits and polo shirts.
Graves has only 30 minutes to make it to the next stop. He watches the ceremony from the back of the hangar. He doesn’t stop grinning, even when the dedication begins. One after another, Clay County civic leaders and politicians walk up to the podium and take turns thanking Graves, whose smile gets even wider. The dedication ends with Graves receiving a plaque.
“I like helping airports,” he tells the crowd. He tells them a tale of growing up near an airstrip in Tarkio and washing planes and mooching rides. “I love doing it. And I love flying. And you’ll see me back here many, many times.”
Afterward, we meet in a cold, air-conditioned conference room in a neighboring building. The afternoon sun dimly lights the shadowy room. Graves sits across a glossy wooden table from me in a leather chair.
“There’s nobody with deeper roots in this district than myself,” Graves says. His voice is quiet, with a slight rasp. He claims incorrectly that Barnes left the district during the Korean War, whereas he has never left.
Graves did leave the district — for four years to attend the University of Missouri-Columbia. He laughs off the correction.
His answers, always to the point, are often curt and occasionally abrasive. He comes across as someone who would rather be anywhere but here. When talking about his widely criticized attack ad against Barnes, Graves says Barnes won’t talk about being pro-choice or about supporting same-sex marriage and amnesty for illegal immigrants. So he will.
“We’re going to point out her record as well as ours, and I’ll stand on my record any day,” Graves says. “And my record is reflective of the 6th Congressional District. Her record is reflective of the 26 blocks of downtown Kansas City.”
Why use two black people in the ad? I ask.
“Because that’s who they hired,” Graves says with exasperation. “I don’t hire the actors, so.”
I ask Graves to define “San Francisco values.”
“San Francisco is the type of place that produces things like preventing schoolchildren from saying ‘under God’ in the pledge of allegiance. It sanctions same-sex marriage,” he says with disgust. “And my opponent wants to spend all of her time out in San Francisco raising money. That’s the values that she reflects, so we’re going to point that out.”
In late March, while discussing a “virtual fence,” Graves compared illegal immigrants with cattle. “I know if I put up a virtual fence on my farm, it wouldn’t keep any cattle in,” Graves said. “It wouldn’t work at all.” When I ask him about the metaphor, Graves loses his composure.
“I’m not even going to glorify that with an answer,” he says. “That was a stupid question.”
I ask Graves if there’s a way to point out Barnes’ stances without attack ads.
“I’m going to point it out,” he says, “and show the contrasts between her just radical, extreme positions and what I think represents the district.”
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Do you feel that your ad shows that? I ask.
“Yeah, I think it shows that,” Graves says. “And it’s exactly what the issues in that ad are talking about, and the fact that she wants to spend her time in San Francisco, which is not representative of the 6th District.”
Unlike Graves’ previous challengers, Barnes will have plenty of money to fight back — and to shape her image. By the end of March, Barnes had raised $1,403,704 in 10 months and had $954,363 in the bank. She has put together an impressive list of donors from Kansas City’s biggest companies, including H&R Block founder Henry Bloch, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and Royals owner David Glass.
Graves’ money doesn’t come only from farmers and little old ladies in northwest Missouri. He has cashed checks from Hallmark CEO Don Hall Jr., Garmin CEO Min-Hwan Kao and J.E. Dunn Construction President Terry Dunn.
In late May, Barnes’ money and St. Joseph roots weren’t helping her. A Survey USA-KCTV Channel 5 poll showed Graves leading Barnes by 10 points — 49 to 39 percent. In St. Joseph, Graves led Barnes 52 to 33 percent.
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