“I endorse Brother Bernie Sanders because he is a long-distance runner with integrity in the struggle for justice for over fifty years. Outsider in the White House is the story of a passionate and principled political life. A new foreword by Nina Turner, former president of Our Revolution and co-chair of the Sanders for President campaign, provides a rare glimpse of Bernie as a person. He is now the longest-serving independent in US political history.Īn extensive afterword by the Nation’s National Affairs correspondent, John Nichols, continues the story with Sanders’s entrance into the Senate, the drama of the 2016 Democratic Primary, his ongoing resistance to Trump, and the thrilling launch of his 2020 bid for the White House. You may doubt that his presidential campaign can win over the wider American public in the way he won over the state of Vermont’s-but you’ve got to admire his tenacity.Bernie Sanders’s political autobiography, w ith an updated afterword that brings his story up to the 2020 presidential campaignĮxplaining where he comes from and how his politics were formed, Senator Bernie Sanders describes in detail how, after cutting his teeth in the Civil Rights movement, he helped build an extraordinary grassroots political campaign in Vermont, making it possible for him to become the first independent elected to the US House of Representatives in forty years. But this matters surprisingly little: for Sanders, the only thing that’s changed over the past 20 years is that the bad guys have got worse. (That, indeed, is the biggest paradox of his run for the Democratic nomination: he is not, and never has been, a Democrat).īilled as Sanders’s “political autobiography,” this book is actually a reskinned version of his 1997 memoir Outsider in the House, so it has rather a lot about the Newt Gingrich Republicans of the 1990s and not much about George W Bush, Barack Obama or the financial crisis. Over the decades, he went from winning 2 per cent of the statewide vote in Vermont to gaining the mayoralty of its largest city, Burlington, by 14 votes and winning campaign after campaign as a congressman and finally senator-doing it all as an independent. The difference is that Saunders has done what Corbyn can, at this stage, only dream of: turned principle into electoral victory. Sanders’s denunciations of inequality, low wages, military overspending, giant corporations, big media, evil billionaires-all could be pasted into Corbyn’s manifesto. They’re also remarkably similar politicians: both formed progressive beliefs as young men, then spent a lifetime making the case for them, pausing only for food and sleep. As this autobiography makes clear, they’re remarkably similar people: serious, principled, utterly lacking in humour. The parallels between Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are striking.
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