When U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof, R-Columbia, came by our offices recently, he called our attention to the callouses on his hands. “Renee [his wife] and I picked 1,200 ears of sweet corn this weekend,” Mr. Hulshof said proudly.
When state Sen. Chris Koster, a Democratic candidate for Missouri attorney general, dropped by, he was wearing cowboy boots with his gray lawyer’s suit. Mr. Koster is a graduate of St. Louis University High School, where there is no Future Farmers of America chapter. He is a trial lawyer by profession. He lives in Belton, a Kansas City suburb, although his Senate district address is a post office box in Harrisonville. “I get the rural thing going for me that way,” Mr. Koster admitted.

The “rural thing” — sweet corn and cowboy boots, horses and hunting dogs — is everywhere this primary season. Even Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, felt compelled to visit outstate Missouri last week. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that only one in four Missourians lives in a rural area, but you wouldn’t know it to watch the campaign commercials:

There is Steve Gaw, a lawyer and a Democratic candidate for the 9th District House seat Mr. Hulshof is vacating, leading his daughter on horseback and promising to clean up Washington right after he cleans up his muddy boots. There is Blaine Luetkemeyer, a former state tourism director and a Republican candidate for the same seat, in plaid shirt and jeans atop a ladder, pounding a hammer on a farm shed as he promises to fix a broken Congress. There is Mr. Hulshof, slinging a bag of feed across his shoulder and climbing into the cab of a tractor.
Mssrs. Hulshof, Gaw and Luetkemeyer actually own farms. So does Lyndon Bode, another Democrat running in the 9th District. They don’t make a living off of them any more, but they’ve got that rural thing going for them. Everybody else, as they say in Texas, is all hat and no cattle.

In 1955, the historian Richard Hofstadter first noted the power of what he called the “Agrarian Myth”:

“The more farming as a self-sufficient way of life was abandoned for farming as a business, the more merit men found in what was being left behind. And the more rapidly the farmers’ sons moved into the towns, the more nostalgic the whole culture became about its rural past. . . . Its hero was the yeoman farmer, its central conception the notion that he is the ideal man and the ideal citizen.”

No state, with the possible exception of Texas, has taken the agrarian myth to heart more than Missouri. No matter how urban they are, statewide candidates go to extremes to emphasize their rural roots, their “country places” in outposts such as Flat, Mo. (former Sen. Jack Danforth), their affection for hunting and/or fishing (Sen. Christopher Bond), their ancestral feed store in Houston, Mo. (Sen. Claire McCaskill), or their love of gospel music (John Ashcroft, former senator, governor and U.S. attorney general).

The “rural thing” got an extra boost in 2006 when Ms. McCaskill campaigned hard in rural Missouri; the Democratic votes she discovered there were enough to help her squeak out a victory over Republican Sen. Jim Talent.

There’s no question that in terms of economic output, agriculture still is Missouri’s biggest industry. Its 104,500 farms rank second among all the states. Those farms produce $5.7 billion worth of crops and $1.5 billion in agricultural exports. Missouri is fourth in rice production, seventh in beans and eighth in corn. It’s sixth in beef and seventh in hogs.

But mechanization means that it doesn’t take very many people to create all that agricultural income. Fewer than 11,000 Missourians work full time in farming.
To get a decent job, more and more that means living in a city. Of Missouri’s 5.8 million people, 4.3 million live in what the Census Bureau defines as urban areas. Politicians know that, but they also know the power of myth, to say nothing of the power of the Farm Bureau and other influential special interest groups associated with agriculture.

The agrarian reality in Missouri — as opposed to the agrarian myth — is that people in rural counties are hurting badly. The average income of rural Missourians is some $10,000 a year less than that of urban Missourians. Nearly all the indicators of poverty are worse in rural counties than they are in urban counties. Jobs are difficult to come by; jobs with decent benefits, harder still. In many rural counties, the biggest employer is Wal-Mart.

The question to keep in mind as you go to the polls Tuesday to choose among all those boot-wearing, corn-picking politicians is which ones understand reality, not myth, and who among them can make the biggest difference in the lives of all Missourians, no matter where they live.