As part of the lead-up to Frontline’s new documentary, The Choice 2012, they’ve asked several close observers and biographers of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to engage in what amounts to an online version of a roundtable discussion about the two men and the formative experiences of their lives.

I found it to be a fascinating exchange.  Take, for example, this entry from Obama biographer David Maraniss responding to an earlier observation by Jodi Kantor:

That’s right, Jodi, and it goes back even a decade before that speech, even before he became a community organizer in Chicago. In 1982 he wrote a letter to a girlfriend in which he described how his life was forcing him to an all-embracing philosophy. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me,” he wrote. “The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions and all the classes; make them mine, mine theirs.”

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