Candidates want to be anybody but Bloomberg

From the NY Times:

Michael R. Bloomberg is a data-loving, health-enforcing nonpartisan who defined what it meant to be a mayor over the past 12 years, mentoring big-city chief executives from New Orleans to Philadelphia.

But closer to home, the major candidates vying to succeed him at City Hall in New York are not pleading for his pointers, or pressing for a place in his photo ops: none of them, Democrat or Republican, have even asked for his political blessing in the primaries next week.

They instead describe polls showing that Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement, once deemed a coveted prize, would now dampen their appeal to the party faithful, not burnish it, and they fret over lashing themselves to his divisive policies on policing, not to mention his soured relationship with municipal unions.

It is a humbling and alien experience for the relatively popular mogul turned mayor, who is unpracticed in humility: in the race to lead a post-Bloomberg New York City, there is profound wariness of being viewed as, well, too much like Mr. Bloomberg.