Michael Barone is a well-known figure in the world of political commentary, has been for several years.

He founded the almanac of American politics and co-authored it for many, many years, as well as writing

six other books at the same time. His new effort is mental maps of the founders, how geographic

imagination guided America's revolutionary leaders. That is our topic today. Welcome, Mr. Barone.

Well, it's very nice to be with you.

Quick, what is a mental map?

A mental map.

We all carry little mental maps around with this in our heads, you know.

The famous New Yorker cartoon by many, many years ago showing the picture of the United

States according to a Manhattanite where there's a huge space between 6th and 7th Avenue

and then another huge space between 8th and 9th Avenue and there's a little tiny space between Chicago and Los Angeles.

That's a mental map. We have a sense of geography. Some people have very well-developed senses

of geography. I think I've been blessed with that for many years.

And some people have almost no sense of it.

It's atrophying now, I think, for many people.

We get guided by the GPS thing, when we're driving or conceivably even walking somewhere.

And we don't really know anything but what's in

our path and we hear this woman with a British accent telling us to turn left get

in the left lane to exit left on you know intersection 14b and we have no idea where this is with relationship to anything

else in the world, except we're going to get to where we want to get to.

You're making me feel, remember my childhood in the back of the station wagon, driving

across the country, with a triptych that had been prepared by

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