Like Hillary, both governors won second terms in landslides and have the executive experience that women are supposed to need in triplicate to get elected.

So maybe the pipeline isn’t empty. But maybe the pipeline isn’t the only way to go, or won’t be by the time the next presidential campaign rolls around.

If Barack Obama could come out of nowhere to sweep voters off their feet, maybe the same could be true for some charismatic woman running for president in the not-too-distant future. Two years ago, both Geraldine Ferraro, the first female candidate of a major political party to run for vice president, and Jesse Jackson were quoted as saying that they thought a black man would have a harder time than a white woman getting elected president, a commonplace view at the time. If perceptions of possibility have fluctuated so much in just two years, imagine how much they could turn around again in four or eight.

It’s possible that what we’ve been waiting for is not a woman who has logged years in Senate committees or kissing babies at state fairs, but a dynamic woman with Mr. Obama’s combination of dramatic back story and cerebral bona fides. Since most of us had never heard of him before his inspirational speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, consider, just for fun, a woman you may never have heard of: Samantha Power.

Ms. Power is a former war correspondent turned Harvard academic whose book about genocide, “A Problem From Hell,” won the Pulitzer Prize and changed national dialogue on the subject. A foreign policy adviser for Mr. Obama, she could very well end up in his cabinet (and she’ll be right around his age, 46, eight years from now). She has not mastered Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor, unlike that other pipeline buster of a female foreign policy expert; but she has also been known to shoot hoops with George Clooney.

Don’t go rushing to register Powerforpresident.com, though  she was born in Ireland, and, therefore, can’t run. But she has the kind of irresistible profile that could be what it takes. Maybe right now there’s some 37-year-old female Iraq vet  fighter pilot would be nice; high ranking, naturally  who’s a former Rhodes Scholar, who raised her three siblings on food stamps and who plays a mean bass.