The Michael Bloomberg for president trial balloon has arrived just in time to elevate and rescue a weary press corps that has been suffering almost nonstop for a year to cover the candidate-surplus slog that is Campaign 2016. Bloomberg has always aspired to be president, if 2006 is a sufficiently distant date to qualify as “always.” It was then, according to David A. Graham’s pocket history of Bloomberg’s presidential ambitions, that the press first noted his White House lust. The piece, written by New York magazine’s John Heilemann—currently one of Bloomberg TV’s two million-dollar TV babies—sketched Bloomberg as someone who “seems to view himself as a man of destiny,” just as you might if you, too, were worth $38.8 billion.

Bloomberg’s flirtation with running in 2008 included heavy tutoring on foreign policy by a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and while he declined to mount a campaign that year, he has continued playing footsie with the office. Footsie transitioned to heavy foreplay early this month when Bloomberg adviser Douglas E. Schoen, a pollster, asserted loudly that his centrist patron would make a “serious contender” against Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz and acknowledged that Bloomberg was “contemplating” a run.