By JULIE BOSMAN


As a new administration arrives , a Washington guessing game begins: who can snag the Obamas for dinner?

“There’s a lot of jockeying right now,”said Ann Walker Marchant, the chief executive of a public relations firm and a niece of Vernon E.Jordan Jr., the longtime Clinton insider.“They certainly know they have an open invitation at my house.”

“Everybody in town wants to see them, everybody wants to go to the White House,”said Sally Quinn, the author, journalist and frequent hostess.“And everybody wants to have them over.”

She added, in careful Washingtonese,“I have no plans to have a party.”

An Obama aide said the transition office has been flooded with invitations to parties, dinners and events.

A new president’s first foray into the social scene in the capital can be heavy with symbolism, a hint of how the first couple plan to engage with unofficial Washington. Failing to do so could mean missing an opportunity to meet the press, make bipartisan overtures and advance the White House political agenda, as other presidents have discovered.

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, arrived in the capital in 1977 determined not to socialize with the insider crowd, a stance that rankled Democrats in Washington.

“The Carters made the vow that they would never get tangled up in Georgetown dinner parties, and indeed they did not,”said Diana McLellan, the author and onetime Washington gossip columnist.“They alienated their base, and it created a huge dislike of Carter. It was catastrophic.”

Quickly after arriving in Washington after his election in 1980, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, enthusiastically made the social rounds. Mrs.Reagan’s social secretary Muffie Brandon Cabot regularly arranged luncheons at private homes so that Mrs. Reagan could make friends.

In the weeks after his election, Bill Clinton appeared at the homes of Pamela Harriman, the Jordans and Katharine Graham, then the publisher of The Washington Post.

Laura Bush spoke for her husband when she said that they did not come to Washington to make new friends.

It is unclear to Washington’s cocktail set whether the new first couple will strike an outgoing social profile like the Reagans, or be more like the reclusive Bushes. Perhaps the more pressing question is how an ambitious hostess would pull it off.

The first step is to reach out to the people who have influence with the Obamas, said Tammy Haddad, a media consultant.

A common tactic is to host a gathering not in honor of Mr.Obama, but for someone close to him, such as one of his top aides, making it difficult for him to refuse the invitation, one Washington hostess slyly suggested.

Another possibility, Ms.McLellan suggested, is to secure the attendance of an A-list guest.“You have to find somebody Obama is dying to meet,”she said.

Ms.Marchant, who learned the ways of Washington while spending six years as a special assistant in the Clinton White House, predicted that the city is in for some social change.

“There’s a lot of unease and charting of new territory, because for so long Washington has been a social town where there are certain people who are the Washington social groups, the hostesses and hosts of the events,”she said.“And I think with the Obamas coming in, people are wondering whether or not those social pecking orders are going to remain the same.”