Outsider in the House doesn’t contain many surprises. Newly republished by Verso under the name Outsider in the White House (with an afterword by the Nation’s John Nichols), Bernie Sanders’s 1996 memoir lays out the political views he’s been espousing now for forty years.

When Sanders complained last year that America doesn’t need “a choice of twenty-three underarm spray deodorants . . . when children are hungry in this country,” he was borrowing a line he had used in his 1979 film about Eugene Debs. Since the late 1970s, Sanders has maintained remarkable consistency in his support for strong labor laws, single-payer health care, and stick deodorant.

Given the sheer improbability of Sanders’s long political career — which took him from fringe third-party activism to the US Senate — it’s too bad that his relatively routine 1996 reelection campaign forms the dramatic hinge of Outsider in the House.