Breakfast topic: Best class for a new gamer?

Eazybee of Suramar has a problem: he's finally convinced his non-gamer wife to give WoW a shot, and wants to know what class might be best to start her off on. Most of the respondents suggested letting her read the character descriptions and pick herself, but a couple of race/class combinations kept showing up as options. These include night elf druid (night elves are cute, and druids let you try out all different roles), gnome mage (gnomes are silly and mages get a lot of neat "extras" that can entice new players) and draenei shaman (they can both roll draenei and explore, and shaman will be in high demand in the Alliance.)

It's all well and good to say that people should choose for themselves, but getting into WoW can be very difficult for non-gamers, and some classes are harder than other early on (hunters are nightmares until ten, in my experience.) If my non-gaming mother said next week "Honey, I'd like to give this Warcraft thing a shot," I would probably recommend a blood elf paladin for her. Blood elves have a beautiful starting area, and paladins are very easy to get to 10 – swing at things, hit things, heal self when health is low. They also don't go out of mana very much when they're lowbies, making it one less part of the game I have to explain.

What race/class combination would you recommend for someone just getting into WoW?