Eric in '09?

Now that Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau — a former Riverdale resident — has scrapped his "90 in '09" campaign for re-election, a line is forming to replace him.

Riverdale and Upper West Side lawmaker Eric Schneiderman might get in it.

"He has to decide very soon," his spokesman, Mike Meade, told me just now.

As City Hall notes, he's coming off the end of a decade-long campaign to get a Democratic majority in the state Senate, and he just got the job he's been gunning for since he was first elected in 1999. Still, he wouldn't have to give up his current job to run.

His competitors have the jump on him, fund-raising-wise, but he's the only one of them to have successfully campaigned for elected office.

Here's the best bit of Edward Isaac Dovere's woolgathering on Mr. Schneiderman:

More than that, though, is the chance that the very same political background which some might see as making Schneiderman strong, may wind up working against him. Local voters, editorial boards and groups like the bar association have often looked to see the office as separate from politics as usual. The result is that while district attorneys elsewhere around the country are often politicians, in New York City, they have tended not to be: Queens District Attorney Richard Brown was a judge in several courts, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes spent most of his pre-DA career as a prosecutor, Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan was a deputy borough president and prosecutor and Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson was a judge and prosecutor. Of the five current city district attorneys, Morgenthau had the most political background, with his run for governor in 1962 and firing as United States attorney by Richard Nixon.