Four years ago, Margaret Talbot, in a piece about Bernie Sanders’s first run for President, wrote about the experience of asking the senator from Vermont to talk about himself. “When I asked Sanders a question about his early years,” Talbot wrote, “he sighed with the air of a man who knows he can no longer put off that visit to the periodontist.” Sanders insisted that he understood the reasons for the question—voters want to feel they know and trust their leaders—and that he was happy to talk about his life. But, as Talbot put it, he couldn’t resist “sermonizing” before doing so. “When I talk about a political revolution, what I’m talking about is how we create millions of decent-paying jobs, how we reduce youth unemployment, how we join the rest of the world, major countries, in having paid family and sick leave,” Sanders said. “I know those issues are not quite as important as my personal life.”

On Saturday, Sanders kicked off his second Presidential campaign with a rally on the campus of Brooklyn College, in New York City. The venue itself suggested a new strategy. Brooklyn is neither in an early primary state nor Sanders’s political home base. But it is where Sanders grew up. Before Sanders stepped onto the stage, Jane Sanders, his wife and political adviser, spoke about their family and said that she hoped people would “get to know” her husband. Nina Turner, Sanders’s campaign co-chair, declared that “Today, you’re going to understand the man.” Shaun King, the social-justice activist, spoke of Sanders’s relatives who died in the Holocaust, of his immigrant father and his working-class childhood, of his student-activism days and his early support for civil rights. “We must reject this idea that who Bernie was in the nineteen-sixties is irrelevant,” King said, perhaps addressing the candidate as much as the crowd. In 2016, Sanders struggled to connect with minority voters. King suggested that the candidate’s reticence to talk about things other than the issues—even as he became famous for his support of policies such as Medicare for All and tuition-free higher education—was partly to blame. “He’s kept some of these powerful stories to himself,” King said.

When Sanders himself took the stage, he began with his usual calls for political change—“We are going to end austerity for working families, and bring a little austerity for the wealthy and the powerful”—but, a few minutes in, he paused, then collected himself. For many politicians, talking about themselves is one of the perks of the job. For Sanders, even as part of a deliberate, new campaign strategy, he felt the need to explain. “If I might take a moment, as I return here to the area where I was born, let me say a few personal words,” he said. “As we launch this campaign for President, you deserve to know where I come from—because family history, obviously, heavily influences the values that we develop as adults.” He spoke of his parents and their dreams and struggles. And he used his story to contrast himself with Donald Trump. “I did not have a father who gave me millions of dollars to build luxury skyscrapers, casinos, and country clubs,” Sanders said. “I did not come from a family that gave me a two-hundred-thousand-dollar allowance every year beginning at the age of three. As I recall, my allowance was twenty-five cents a week.” Sanders is seventy-seven years old. He has held elected office for nearly forty years. On Saturday, he set out on his second try for the Presidency, entering a Democratic field crowded with candidates, many of them calling for policies of similar scope and ambition to the ones he proposed four years ago. He began by reintroducing himself.