For Eric Schneiderman, New York Attorney General, Some Notice

Until fairly recently, he acknowledged, if you had asked the average passer-by to name New York’s attorney general, you might have gotten a mystified “Huh?” or the answer that it was Andrew M. Cuomo (the governor who used to have the job) or Eliot Spitzer (the disgraced former governor who had it before that), rather than the correct response: Mr. Schneiderman.

In the eight months since he has assumed the office, the emphatically unglamorous Mr. Schneiderman has maintained a low profile for the state’s top law-enforcement officer, charting a busy but anonymous course between Spitzerian aggression and Cuomoesque charm. Even his own press aide, Danny Kanner, recently confessed that, before this summer, his own parents did not know who Mr. Schneiderman was. “And I’m their kid; I work for the guy,” Mr. Kanner said.

But then came August, when Mr. Schneiderman, 56, rejected a proposed nationwide settlement releasing some of the country’s biggest banks from a lawsuit brought by the states claiming misconduct in the mortgage markets. Almost overnight, he found his own name mentioned in a series of laudatory articles in publications as varied as Rolling Stone, The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and the Web site Gawker.

Adding fuel to the profile-raising fire were the phone calls Mr. Schneiderman received this summer from officials in the Obama administration who pressured him to smarten up and join his counterparts in other states in settling the case. There were reports that a Federal Reserve official, Kathryn S. Wylde, had harangued him in public for his stubbornness (at the funeral for Hugh L. Carey, the former New York governor, no less). At the end of August, an unrepentant Mr. Schneiderman was kicked off the executive committee of attorneys general in charge of the case by its leader, Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa.

Ever since, the four-member Correspondence Unit in Mr. Schneiderman’s office, in a building wedged between the New York Stock Exchange and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, has been dealing with a flood of mail. It is, by all accounts, a spontaneous and grass-roots eruption of thank-you notes.

From Brooklyn, there was this: “Thank you for upholding the law.”

From Manhattan, this: “I promise to volunteer for your campaign.”

From Baldwinsville, N.Y.: “The people are behind you!”

And an echo, from Ware, Mass.: “You have the people’s support.”

Arriving by the day, sometimes by the hour, there have been e-mails and letters from places like Charlottesville, Va.; Athens, Ohio; Placerville, Calif.; and East Berlin, Conn.

Someone from Long Island wrote to say (in capital letters): “THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!” There was a hat-tip from Los Angeles: “Good luck, sir. You are a beacon of responsibility in a dark and murky landscape.”

Along with the correspondence, there has also been a small tsunami of campaign donations, many in the form of modest checks ($5, $10) from ordinary people in unlikely locations: Clarkston, Ga.; Okemos, Mich.; Anderson, S.C.; Eufala, Ala.  During two weeks in August and September, Mr. Schneiderman received $4,179 in contributions. That may not sound impressive until one learns that they came from 36 people in 34 cities in 19 states.

So far, Mr. Schneiderman seems to have taken this attention in stride, or at least with a convincing semblance of stride.

“Honestly, my day-to-day life hasn’t changed,” he said in an interview last month. “It’s not like people are turning around, staring at me on the street. I have been getting a lot of support from people who are calling in, or writing, or calling my friends or people who work for us, and that’s gratifying. But I think this is kind of a no-brainer. I’m doing my job as a prosecutor. There was a lot of misconduct, and it needs to be looked into.”

Mr. Schneiderman is not alone in questioning the settlement arrangement, which its critics say would wrest up to $20 billion from Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and others for broad immunity from prosecution. The attorneys general in Delaware, Nevada and Minnesota have also expressed qualms that the deal is weak and inappropriately favorable to the banks. On Sept. 22, Jack Conway, the Kentucky attorney general, joined the dissenters, sending out his own announcement in praise of Mr. Schneiderman’s position.

Still, New York State’s attorney general, armed with weapons like the Martin Act, a powerful state securities law, has always been a first among equals and has conventionally held a second, if informal, title as the Sheriff of Wall Street. Some, like Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Spitzer, have parlayed prosecutions of the banks into successful campaigns for governor. Mr. Schneiderman, who has not expressed interest in higher office, has not let his close-up moment go unused. While he was in negotiations with the banks, his political fund-raising committee sent an e-mail to supporters trumpeting his “tough fight” against the industry. The e-mail was titled “Standing Up for You.”

This occasioned a rare instance of criticism, in The Daily News, which scolded Mr. Schneiderman in September for letting his actions be guided “by political considerations.” The New York Post is also on the attack. Two weeks ago, it published an article gleefully announcing that a 36-year-old lawyer in Mr. Schneiderman’s office was moonlighting as a professional dominatrix. (She has been suspended.) Weeks before that, in an editorial criticizing his objection to the settlement, it slighted Mr. Schneiderman himself — in a strange affront to the city — as an “ambitious, liberal New York pol.”

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