INDEPENDENCE Day will forever have a new meaning for Samantha Power, the Irish-born, Harvard educated ex-advisor to Senator Barack Obama who was deep sixed from the campaign when she called Hillary Clinton a monster.

July 4 was the day Power, 38, shed her independence and married Cass Sunstein, another Harvard educated brainiac who is one of the nation's most respected legal scholars. The groom is also a close ally of Obama, and the newly married couple met while Power was working for Obama in Chicago.

The wedding took place in Waterville, Co. Kerry, first at the Mary Immaculate Church, and then the Waterville Lake Hotel. Given that it's summer in Ireland the weather was miserable, but the bride held up just fine, according to a report in the Irish Independent.

She pulled up to the church in a Lexus driven by her uncle from Co. Cork, and was garbed in a cream lace dress and matching veil. Her stepfather Edmund Bourke walked her down the aisle, and one of the prayers of the faithful called "for the victims of cruelty and injustice, for those who protect wildlife and animals and those who are poor and persecuted."

The groom is 54 and has an 18-year-old stepdaughter named Ellyn. She was given special recognition by the newlyweds in their wedding program "for approving" of her new stepmom.

The relationship between Power and Sunstein set gossip tongues wagging when it came to light a few months back, especially when Sunstein ditched his professorship at the University of Chicago to join Power at Harvard.

"She became the recent topic of gossip on legal blogs when word spread that Professor Sunstein had broken up with his companion of more than a decade, the philosopher and scholar Martha Nussbaum, and taken up with Ms. Power," The New York Times reported in February.

"In an interview, he denounced the blogs and their intimations of a romantic triangle. He and Professor Nussbaum separated amicably in November, he said, and he decided to accept Harvard's offer shortly thereafter. He and Ms. Power did not begin dating until early January, he said, after meeting through the Obama campaign."