Merry Christmas to all and may your families be safe and happy at this wonderful time of the year!

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Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson is stepping down after two terms in office.

I bet if I had asked, “Who is the state’s AG?” you would have drawn a blank, just as almost everyone does if asked about the constitutional officers of Huskerland, other than the governor.

It’s not that the duties of the top law enforcement officer aren’t important, or any less significant than, say, the state auditor or the state treasurer, but these guys are just there, holding down safe Republican seats and sometimes dreaming about running for governor or United States senator.

The “down ticket” politicians hold office, sometimes for a long, long time, facing little if any ballot opposition. Take Allen Beermann, the man who served as secretary of state for 24 years (1971-1995) and then became executive director of the Nebraska Press Association for another two dozen years before finally retiring.

Beermann was a competent, efficient, jovial public servant for all those years. But, like the vast majority of elected state officers was never a household name.

The same was true of John Gale, who served as secretary of state for 19 years after being defeated in a run for Congress in the GOP primary by Tom Osborne.

The state constitutional offices are a dead end for the politically ambitious, though.

Don Stenberg, who was attorney general for a dozen years (1991-2003) illustrates the point. As a young Harvard Law alum, he served as an assistant to the Nebraska governor and dreamed of bigger things. He won the AG’s office but lost several bids for the U.S. Senate. He was elected state treasurer and thought about a run for the governorship, but he decided against it.

Jon Bruning is another man who ran for and was elected attorney general, all the time with higher offices in his dreams.

You have to hand it to guys like Stenberg and Bruning.

They have endurance. Bruning was AG for a dozen years and hoped to move up to the Senate or the governor’s residence, but he was not lucky.

Help me on this. I can’t think of anyone in one of these constitutional offices who ever made it to either the governor’s job or the U.S. Senate.

Yes, there was Constantine J. Smyth, an early dean of Creighton’s School of Law, who served as AG — a Democrat no less! — and later was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Bob Spire, who was first appointed AG by Gov. Bob Kerrey and then won an election as a Republican, told me the office was mostly administrative and he missed the day-to-day thrill of being a lawyer.

Perhaps that is the case with Peterson.

But Peterson is still relatively young and years of a fulfilling career await him. Or maybe he will long for some more time as a public servant and run for office in the future!

Richard Shugrue is a professor emeritus at the Creighton University School of Law and a columnist for The Daily Record.