15 Obama administration power couples

Tom Donilon and Cathy Russell 

The pre-eminent Biden power couple, Donilon, 54, and Russell, 48, were advisers to Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign, and Donilon has been a longtime counselor on foreign policy and judicial issues, helping scuttle Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987. 

Both returned for Biden’s 2008 presidential run, with Russell, who worked in the Clinton Justice Department and for a pair of Senate committees on which Biden served, volunteering as chief of staff for Biden’s wife, Jill. Russell now holds the same post for now-second lady Jill Biden. 

Donilon, chief of staff in former President Bill Clinton’s State Department, left a lucrative partnership at O’Melveny & Myers to become deputy national security adviser to Obama. 

Donilon’s younger brother, Mike Donilon, also is a counselor to Biden.

Lael Brainard and Kurt Campbell 

These two wonks, who met in Cambridge, Mass., where she was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he at Harvard, rose in prominence after leaving jobs in the Clinton administration.

She became a senior fellow at Brookings while he co-founded the influential Center for a New American Security think tank. They each published a handful of books and together started a pair of consulting firms that reaped more than $1 million, partly by representing big-time defense contractors. 

In March, Brainard, 47, was tapped to be undersecretary of treasury for international affairs, while Campbell, 51, was nominated in April as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. 

The couple married in 1998 at a Civil War-era farmhouse they own in Rappahannock County, Va. They have three young daughters. Just before the election, they bought a 100-year-old, six-bedroom house in upper Northwest Washington.

Jen O’Malley Dillon and Patrick Dillon 

These young-but-seasoned political operatives have Obama’s inside-outside game down pat. 

At 32, she’s the president’s hand-picked executive director of the DNC. At 31, he’s the White House deputy director of political affairs. 

They met in 2003 as staffers for then-Sen. John Edwards’ presidential bid and went on to work on former Sen. Tom Daschle’s unsuccessful 2004 reelection bid. 

The couple married in July 2007 while she was running Edwards’ Iowa campaign and he was chief of staff for Iowa Gov. Chet Culver.

Michele Flournoy and W. Scott Gould 

Call them Obamaland’s first couple of defense. 

Her job as undersecretary of defense for policy makes her the Pentagon’s third-highest-ranking civilian, while his gig as deputy veterans affairs secretary makes him the No. 2 at the VA. 

Flournoy, 48, co-founded an influential left-leaning national security think tank with Campbell. Since joining the Pentagon, she has run point defending Obama’s plans in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gould, 51, is a retired captain in the Navy Reserves who, until joining the administration, was a vice president for public sector strategy at IBM. 

The pair both worked in the Clinton administration and afterward started a consulting firm, which last year took in at least $60,000 from clients including defense contractors Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, according to her financial disclosure form. 

The couple lives with their three children in Bethesda.

Katie McCormick Lelyveld and Tommy Vietor

Between them, this rising young power couple has Washington’s top power couple covered.

McCormick Lelyveld, 30, is first lady Michelle Obama’s press secretary. Vietor, 28, is an assistant press secretary for the president, for whom he also worked in the Senate.

She worked for Kerry in 2004; he worked for Edwards. But both signed on early with Obama, logging considerable time in Iowa before settling into Obama headquarters in Chicago, where she was raised.

The pair, who share an apartment in Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, got engaged this month when he flew to Paris, where she was staffing the first lady, and surprised her at the U.S. ambassador’s residence.

Chris Lu and Katie Thomson

Lu and Thomson met in the early 1990s as young lawyers at Sidley Austin.

Lu, 43, left for the Hill in 1997, working in the House before eventually landing in the just-opened office of a freshman senator named Obama. Lu stuck with Obama, eventually running the Senate office and becoming the executive director of the presidential transition team before moving into the White House as Obama’s liaison to the Cabinet and federal agencies.