According to Richard Leibly of The Washington Post, "Washington must have power couples. It needs them, or at least the idea of them."

With the dawning of the Age of Obama in our nation's capital, a new social structure is coming into play and Washingtonians are moving place cards around their tables as if it was a new game of chess. The white male business leaders who made up the 'power couples' of the Bush years have been replaced with fascinating and gracious new couples who are African-American, scholars and yes, even gay.

In his article "Doubling Down", Leibly profiles the game of power couples and who has appeared to have emerged as the new 'power couples'. Of course, as the reporter points out in the article, the first rule of a power couple is to deny that you are one! Over the next four years, these couples are the ones you will read about in the society pages, gossip columns (hopefully for good reasons!) and with whom you will find journalists and elected officials mixing it up with around the couples' tables.

Currently, there appears to be a Hall of Fame of Power Couples already in Washington, D.C. Among them would be Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan along with James Carville and Mary Matalin. Some of the previous Hall of Famer's have moved away like Bob Shrum and Marylouise Oates. Yet they still follow Rule Number One and deny they are a power couple. The reporters writes: ".....Bob Shrum and Marylouise Oates, who leave behind fond memories of their casual soirees and their nicknames, "Oatsie" and "Shrummy" (Although to this day, they deny being a power couple: "That was not us," Oates swears. "Shrummy did campaigns and I made a lot of meatloaf.")

Some of the new Obama couples are more old times and some are fresh faces. Attorney General Eric Holder and Sharon Malone  have been a fixture in Washington for quite some time. Among the fresh faces are Washington's new hot gay couple, Jeremy Bernard and Rufus Gifford ( Photograph). Journalist Leibly writes of them:

Rule No. 3: To be a full-fledged power couple, you need a decent-size kitchen and/or the number of a good caterer. This is essential to staging one of those fabled dinner parties, which are usually held in a baroque-looking house somewhere on the Hill, Kalorama or Georgetown. But not always: Obama brings with him some young, urban cool; a nice downtown apartment will do.

Rufus Gifford, 34, and Jeremy Bernard, 44 -- leading candidates for Washington's new same-sex power couple -- just migrated from Los Angeles, where they raised millions of dollars for Obama. They landed a two-bedroom apartment in a trendy "green" building in Logan Circle.

"We had that conversation: Is it big enough to entertain," says Gifford, new finance director for the Democratic National Committee. "It's certainly more confined that we are used to, but we can fit a cocktail party for a couple dozen people."

Initiated to Washington ways as deputy treasurer for the Clinton '93 inaugural committee, Bernard has been appointed White House liaison to the National Endowment for the Humanities. He and Gifford have been together three years; they placed on Out magazine's 2008 list of the country's 50 most influential gays.

"We had a certain amount of juice out West, but we're newcomers here and we're going to have to work hard," says Gifford, a former entertainment industry executive. He and Bernard mainly knew the Obama Chicago crowd from a distance, by phone. Here, "we will have time to cement relationships, and to expand the circle . . . and see what makes this town tick."

Now about my invitations on my next visit to Washington...