As Vice President Joe Biden reaches a deadline on his flirtations with a 2016 presidential run this week, it’s been hard to ignore how he got to this will-he-or-won't-he moment. Though there’d been a semi-serious Draft Biden movement in place for some time, it wasn’t until August 1 that a campaign looked like a real possibility.

That's when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd broke the news in the third act of a Sunday Review column that Biden was seriously considering a run at the White House at the behest of his son Beau, who died of brain cancer at 46, in May.

“Beau was losing his nouns and the right side of his face was partially paralyzed,” Dowd wrote. “But he had a mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.”

Though Dowd’s sourcing was opaque—the anecdote didn’t come with any attribution—its emotional gut punch landed, and Biden was off to the hypothetical races. A new report from Politico holds that that was Biden's idea and doing. Specifically, according to reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere's sources, Biden leaked the story to Dowd himself, essentially “plac[ing] an ad” for his supporters to call him.

By Politico’s account, Biden is still quite undecided at this point. Beau’s death still profoundly affects him, and several members of his family are opposed—but the vice president’s call to Dowd was a “trial balloon” to see whether he would have the support of his friends and allies if he decided to run for president.

“Calculation sort of sounds crass, but I guess that’s what it is,” an unnamed supporter told Politico. “The head is further down the road than the heart is.”

The calculus worked. Shortly after Dowd’s story ran on August 1, articles taking the Draft Biden movement seriously mushroomed, and Biden himself started fielding calls from his old campaign staffers and fundraisers, as well as arranging that now-famous, not-so-secret lunch with Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Though Biden might have demonstrated some strange foresight, Politico’s sources are adamant that he’s not doing this for his own ambition, and might perhaps think of it as “exactly what the family needs to find new purpose and a sense of renewal”:

…Biden’s decision is an emotional one too. The tears he is shedding are real. He feels an obligation not just to his son—the line in his interview with Stephen Colbert that he believes he’d be letting Beau down “if I didn’t just get up” has become one of the touchstone moments, as people involved describe his deliberations—but to other people who’ve told him that he’s an inspiration in their own grief.

But even if he decides to run, he’d be at a profound disadvantage due to his lack of a campaign apparatus, his late start at fundraising, and his lack of time in the early primary states (which his would-be opponent Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have locked down).

Biden will reportedly make a decision to run this week, though he’s made it clear that he won’t appear at the upcoming CNN Democratic primary debate (mostly to mess with the candidates’ heads, if he hasn’t announced by then).