``Absolutely,'' said McCaffery - believed by insiders to have strong support from Democratic Party boss U.S. Rep. Bob Brady, and from state Sen. Vince Fumo, D-Phila.
``He's been very active in politics and the political process,'' said veteran consultant Jack Collins, one of many pundits who sees McCaffery as the front-runner - in good part because no one else is so aggressively seeking the job.
Abraham said last week that she'll decide by Labor Day whether she's running for mayor.
But some outstanding issues exist:
Some political experts question whether the panel of Common Pleas judges will cooperate. They spurned the Brady-Fumo DA choice, Russell Nigro, now a state Supreme Court justice, in favor of Abraham in 1991. Some experts said many judges may resent the attention-grabbing McCaffery and want to elect one of their own.
Will black activists, who've clashed so frequently with Abraham now push for an African-American to become the next DA?
When would Abraham actually resign? Political associates of the controversial pro-death penalty DA expect her to seek to keep her job for as long as possible, possibly into the spring. That could trigger a political brouhaha over the City Charter requirement that candidates for a higher office quit immediately.
On the surface, the selection of McCaffery as the next DA seems like a political no-brainer.
Since McCaffery was elected in 1993 to the city's Municipal Court - normally an obscure branch of the criminal-justice system - he has been a political dynamo who's even been touted as a possible candidate for mayor.
The son of Irish immigrants, McCaffery first started making the news in 1995, when he began night court sessions in some of Philadelphia's rowdier police districts, dispensing speedy justice to quality-of-life nuisance criminals. The nuisance-crime crackdown was later expanded to a special prostitution court.
