By Edith Honan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York state attorney general candidate Kathleen Rice said on Thursday she hoped to renew the office's focus on "kitchen table" issues and broaden the job beyond the role of the so-called "Sheriff of Wall Street."

Rice, in her second term as Nassau County District Attorney, is one of five Democrats seeking the nomination to succeed Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer as the state's chief prosecutor after Spitzer turned the office into an aggressive enforcer of financial crimes.

The winner of Tuesday's primary will face Dan Donovan, the lone Republican running in the heavily Democratic state, in the November 2 general election.

"I think it's important for the office to be known as 'the People's Attorney,'" Rice, 45, told Reuters in an interview. "I think that only calling it the 'Sheriff of Wall Street' is doing it a disservice to Main Street and the issues of everyday families that they deal with sitting at their kitchen table."

Rice said she would focus on consumer and investor protections, civil rights and cleaning up the state capital, Albany, which she has described as a "crime scene" of political corruption that her experience as a prosecutor makes her uniquely qualified to do.

"I have actively run a law enforcement agency. No one else in the race has that experience," she said.

The Democratic field also includes two state legislators, state Assemblyman Richard Brodsky and state Senator Eric Schneiderman, as well as two lawyers with long histories taking on white-collar crime -- Eric Dinallo, a former assistant attorney general under Spitzer, and Sean Coffey, a former Wall Street lawyer who has represented both wronged investors and firms.

CDOs AND CDSs

Rice was an early favorite in the race and has been a prodigious fundraiser. But with no clear frontrunner in the lead into the Tuesday primary, Rice's opponents have criticized her for a lack of financial credentials.

During a televised debate this week, Coffey took aim at Rice, questioning whether she knew the meaning of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs) -- two of the investment instruments at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis.

On Thursday, Rice fired back, calling it a cheap shot.

"Knowing what a collateralized debt obligation and a credit default swap is -- that's all wonderful -- and this isn't really a trivia contest," Rice said. "My position has always been that you cannot be a Wall Street insider to regulate Wall Street just as you can't be an Albany insider to clean up Albany."

"There were plenty of people who knew what those things were and they couldn't stop ... the mortgage meltdown. They couldn't stop all the Ponzi schemes. And they were pretty knowledgeable people," she added.

Rice also fired back at Coffey and Donovan, who have both pledged not to use the attorney general post as a platform to run for governor and challenged other candidates to do the same.

"The last time I checked, no one's been asking either one of them to run for governor," she said.

Rice declined to rule out running for higher office someday.

Spitzer successfully ran for governor in 2006 and Cuomo is the frontrunner this year, though Spitzer resigned in 2008 when he was caught up in a prostitution scandal.