The Next Hillary Clinton, again

The NY Times asks the same question that I asked 3 months ago: if Hillary Clinton isn't going to be the first female president, who will? They named basically the same names that I did. One thing that I noted was this:

That woman will come from the South, or west of the Mississippi. She will be a Democrat who has won in a red state, or a Republican who has emerged from the private sector to run for governor. She will have executive experience, and have served in a job like attorney general, where she will have proven herself to be "a fighter" (a caring one, of course).

I think perhaps the NY Times and I both suffered from a lack of imagination. Who would have guessed 6 years ago that the first black president would be someone like Barack Obama? You know, a first-term US Senator with a white mother who grew up overseas and in Hawaii... I would have guessed someone like Harold Ford: the scion of a political family from the South with a dozen years in the House, as well as having having a bit more of a national profile over that time. So I figure we could easily be wrong here, too.