It's been rumored all week, but WGBH News received confirmation Wednesday from a source close to him that former Gov. Deval Patrick plans to run for president . WGBH Radio's political reporter Adam Reilly spoke with WGBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath about the development. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Arun Rath: So tell us what you've heard.

Adam Reilly: I have heard and confirmed what has been reported elsewhere, first by CNN, I believe, that former Gov. Deval Patrick has decided that he's going to seek the presidency, that he'll make it official by the end of the week, and that he has been contacting supporters and elected officials today to let them know what his intentions are.

Rath: Well, now, wasn't it about a year ago that he said he was not going to run?

Reilly: Your memory is excellent. It was a little under a year ago, in December 2018. He posted a statement on Facebook saying that he'd thought about it and had decided that ultimately the process of running for president, were he to do it, would be guaranteed to, as he put it, blow back on the people that he and his wife love and that he was going to take a pass. That that was the reason: he was concerned about the impact on his loved ones.

Rath: Now, I wouldn't think that there'd be less of a reason that his family would be put under pressure now, than a year ago. So what's changed?

Reilly: I don't know if his thinking on that has shifted at all. It'd be interesting to see if he addresses that in the coming days. What has changed since then is the state of the Democratic field, as it's currently comprised, prior to him hopping into the race.

I actually was looking at a video of Patrick making his inaugural appearance as a CBS News political contributor back in September. And he made it clear a couple months ago that he was concerned about the direction in which things were going. He questioned Joe Biden's comportment. He said that to his eye, and he said, I'm a fan of the vice president, but it seems to me like he becomes hostile when he is questioned and he needs to learn to stop doing that. He was also asked about some other individuals in the field, and ended up saying that he was concerned that support of Medicare for All, which has become not Democratic orthodoxy, but there's definitely increased interest in it this election cycle, that it is imprudent for Democrats to embrace that — that Medicare for All would be damaging from a medical innovation point of view.

Two people who have backed Medicare for All are, of course, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Rath: This sounds a lot like the rationale we're hearing about former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg entering the race — that there is a constituency in the middle that's not being hit. Who would be Deval Patrick's constituency?

Reilly: Well, if you try to imagine who he is going to be able to raise money from, he is going to be a guy who will do quite well with corporate donors. He works at Bain Capital right now. We should specify that he works on a fund which is supposed to couple profitable investment with achieving social good. So it's sort of the enlightened side of what Bain does.

Rath: But the same Bain Capital that Mitt Romney worked for and was kind of demonized.

Reilly: Yes, demonized exactly, by President Obama.

He has also worked at Texaco, Coca-Cola. He was on the board of directors of Ameriquest, the subprime lender. That's something that got increased attention back when he was thinking about a run a year ago. It's sure to get increased attention now. So I think people who work in corporate America, who are concerned about the anti-corporate tenor of, say, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, are a natural constituency when it comes to fundraising.

But I also have to stress that Go. Patrick is an incredibly gifted orator and rhetorician. He was sounding like Barack Obama in terms of striking a kind of uplifting message of American unity back when he was running for governor the first time in 2006, two years before Barack Obama went in the same direction. So if you liked where Obama went rhetorically when he argued that there was no red America, no blue America, but the United States of America, you're probably going to like what you're going to hear from Deval Patrick.