It’s an opportunity for the Democrats that Michael Bloomberg has finally thrown his $50 billion hat into the ring for president. We’ve run more editorials encouraging him to do so than any other publication in the country. We’d reprint the batch of them herewith, but our vast farm of Internet servers would run out of random access memory.

It’s true that just the other day we issued an editorial critical of the mayor for apologizing for his policing strategy known as stop, question, and frisk. If Hizzoner doesn’t have the political fortitude to defend his own successful signature anti-crime program, we suggested, it gets harder to see the logic of him pursuing the Democratic nomination.

Then again, too, the Democrats promptly held another of their debates, this one at Atlanta. The party’s scrum reminded America how desperately the Democrats need a moderate. On taxes, trade, monetary policy, federal spending, immigration, Mr. Bloomberg would make a more reasonable and rational candidate than any of his Democratic opponents.

It is not our intention at the moment to endorse Mr. Bloomberg, or anyone else, in the general election. We’ve opposed the mayor’s campaign against the Second Amendment, his muscling in to get the city a share of cigarette revenues, and his nanny-statism on everything from soda pop to French fries. His obsession with so-called public health is one of the roads to serfdom.

President Trump neither drinks nor smokes. Yet even he hasn’t sought to cluck-cluck the American public about their lifestyles the way Mr. Bloomberg does. The mayor’s anti-soda regulation got thrown out by the courts. Mr. Bloomberg dropped $7 million of his own money on a scheme to sideline political parties that was so unconstitutional even the Democrats wouldn’t go for it.

Mr. Bloomberg showed two lapses of character during his mayoralty. In one, he transfoggled the city council into legislating a way for him to run for a third term though voters in the city had, via a direct referendum, established a two-term limit. In the other, he opposed John Roberts’ confirmation as Chief Justice for fear the judge mightn’t support abortion.

That, we said “epitomizes everything that many of us see as the disappointing side of the mayor, his spinelessness, his tendency to pander, his disregard for political loyalty, his self-righteousness when it comes to what he defines as matters of ‘public health,’ his special-interest-driven politicking, accompanied by blather about how he isn’t motivated by politics, his allegiance only to himself, his abuse of public resources, his arrogance, his hypocrisy, his combination of grandiosity and smallness.”

Our erstwhile colleague, Pia Catton, likes to rib us about that editorial, saying “Now this is a guy that you guys liked!” It’s true.We issued that editorial only days after endorsing Mr. Bloomberg for a second term. His opponent was just too far to the left. Today, with Mayor de Blasio running Gotham, New Yorkers look back on the Bloomberg era as relatively halcyon.

Which is something to mark. Mr. de Blasio is where the Democratic Party is headed absent Mr. Bloomberg, or someone similarly hard-headed. Even those Democrats who pass in the party as moderates — Vice President Biden, say, or Senator Klobuchar — are to Hizzoner’s left. So we wish Mr. Bloomberg well in the primaries.

If Mr. Bloomberg wins the nomination and President Trump survives impeachment, then it would be what the Drudge Report is calling the Battle of the Billionaires. Mr. Bloomberg may be ten times wealthier, but Mr. Trump found a way to win while spending less than half of what Hillary Clinton spent. Again, this isn’t an endorsement. In a race with Mr. Bloomberg, though, Mr. Trump would be — in terms of policy — the moderate.

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Image: Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.