cks175 looks at possible female presidential candidates down the road:

So who are the most likely women in 2016?  MSN Money recently ranked the five most powerful women in US politics..  Michelle Bachman, Jan Brewer, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Nancy Pelosi  top that list.  Pelosi and Brewer will be too old to run, Bachman is not a credible player, and that leaves Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.  Michelle would have to follow Hillary’s (and her husband Barak’s) path and find a Senate seat in 2014, but that would be contingent on President Obama losing the upcoming election in November.  If Obama is re-elected, Michelle’s earliest shot at the Presidency would be in 2020.

But their are certainly other women the Democrats could look to.  Here at DailyKos we’ve read more than a few diaries promoting Elizabeth Warren.  She would make an ideal candidate, but she won’t be a realistic possibility unless she can win the Massachusetts Senate seat back for the Democrats in November.

Conventional wisdom points to the ranks of governors for likely Presidential candidates, and in that realm, the Republicans have a clear advantage over Democrats in terms of women currently holding the office.  On the Democrat side, we’ve got Christine Gregorie, of Washington,  and Bev Purdue, the North Carolina gov who is not seeking re-election.  Of those two, Christine makes the much better candidate.

On the Republican side, we’ve got Susana Martinez, Jan Brewer, Mary Fallin and Nikki Haley.   Of those, Susana Martinez would probably be the one to have the best chance in a general election.  If she did run and win the nomination, she would potentially make history twice as both the first female and first Hispanic to become President.

I think this list is probably about right, which means the odds of a woman president in 2016 or 2020 are fairly low. Secretary Clinton hasn’t given a Sherman statement, but she’s come really close to it. Clinton’s work as Secretary of State has essentially neutralized Democratic mistrust of her of the sort that was actually quite prevalent in 2007-8, if she wanted the nomination, it would be hers. But it does not appear that she wants it at the moment. Mrs. Obama has declared no interest in politics, and I’m not sure she has all that clear a path if she changed her mind. The Illinois seat up in 2014 is currently held by Dick Durbin, who is unlikely to give it up as he’s next in line to be Majority Leader if and when Harry Reid steps down. I highly doubt Michelle Obama would mount a primary challenge against her husband’s close friend and mentor, and if she did, I doubt it would be successful. Durbin is an entrenched figure in state politics, while a Michelle Obama political campaign would be rife with accusations of dynasty-building, and Mrs. Obama herself would be a first-time candidate. What’s more, typically a president’s popularity and power begin to wane at around the sixth year of their tenures (assuming, as I do, that B. Obama gets another term). Selling another Obama candidacy would be tough under those circumstances. On the other hand, she could take on freshman Republican Sen. Mark Kirk in 2016, which would be an entirely different matter–Kirk was a weak candidate who sort of squeaked by in 2010 and has had health problems since then (also, you might recall he lied about being a nursery school teacher, among many other things). He might stand down after one term, and should Kirk run again, Michelle Obama would be a reasonable candidate to run against him in the abstract. And presidents tend to rise in popularity as their terms end*, so a 2016 run against an incumbent of an opposing party would be far better. But going from there to running for president in four years…obviously, it’s been done, but hundreds of things could go wrong there, and a lot will depend on how Democratic activists view Mr. Obama’s presidency a few years after the fact. That’s a big known unknown. As for the rest, I very highly doubt either Gregoire or Purdue would fare well as a national candidate. They’ve both worn poorly on their constituents in office, and as the meteoric non-rise of Tim Pawlenty showed, middling-to-poor home state favorability usually happens for a reason. Martinez would be a strong candidate in 2016 if she were to run, but Brewer, Fallin and Haley are all unlikely for the same reasons: too extreme, limited appeal outside of the base, and both Haley and Fallin run very small states. Which is not always a killer, but let’s be honest, none of these people are Bill Clinton. I’ve talked about Warren before: she’s credible if she wins this year, but I have real questions about how her campaign would have to be structured in order to work. You could make the case that she’s the perfect Democratic hopeful, in that she could be warm and populist in Iowa, then technocratic in neighboring New Hampshire. Possible. But the same argument could be made to say that she’d have a very hard time because she doesn’t quite fit the sorts of candidates that either state has gone for in recent times. Could she out-technocrat and out-East Coast Andrew Cuomo in NH? Could she out-Midwest and out-populist Sherrod Brown in Iowa? I really don’t know. I don’t know if she’ll even want to. She might just want to have a Senate career, or hold out for a very possible VP offer.

The names not on the list that come to my head are: Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC), Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. Napolitano is not likely to run, and if she did, I suspect various controversies would dog her throughout the process and make crossover support unlikely. (I continue to think that Obama ought to have given the job to Susan Collins and allowed Napolitano to continue her career in Arizona.) Hagan strikes me as actually a pretty decent shot if she wins re-election–decent record, important state, not necessarily flashy, but solid. Solis has been pretty good as Labor Secretary, and if she is able to win a Senate seat in California, anything could happen. And, of course, this is all kind of pointless given that Barack Obama came from nowhere in 2004 to win the presidency in 2008. It’s hard to know which figures will all of a sudden become prominent.

* G.W. Bush is a notable exception.