POSTELECTION ROUNDUP
CHURCHGOERS REFLECT ON OBAMA
Jubilation, pride and relief permeated pews and pulpits at predominantly black churches across the country on the first Sunday after Barack Obama's election as president, with congregants blowing horns, waving U.S. flags and raising their hands to the heavens.
At Los Angeles' oldest black church, ushers circulated through the aisles carrying boxes of tissues as men and women, young and old, wept openly and unabashedly at the fall of the nation's greatest racial barrier.
And on the day that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famously called "the most segregated day of the week," black and white Christian clergy members asked God to give Obama the wisdom and strength to lead the country out of what many consider to be a wilderness of despair.
At a white church in Mississippi -- a state where roughly nine in 10 whites voted for Republican John McCain -- the scene was more muted. While the Rev. David Carroll recognized Obama's election as a "historic shift," he spent just as much time praising McCain's patriotism in defeat.
Obama, meanwhile, skipped services and went to the gym. He doesn't have a church in Chicago since severing ties with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and has yet to decide which Washington church his family will attend.
CO-PRESIDENT? NO THANKS
What kind of first lady will Michelle Obama be?
Valerie Jarrett, a longtime family friend who is helping lead the president-elect's transition team, said in a broadcast interview Sunday: "Having a seat at ... the table and being co-president is not something she's interested in doing."
She prefers, at least for now, to focus on easing the transition for daughters Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7 -- getting them in new schools and comfortable with a new way of life.
OUI, WE CAN!
Inspired by the U.S. president-elect, France's First Lady and other leading figures say it's high time for that country to stamp out racism and shake up a white political and social elite that smacks of colonial times.
A manifesto published Sunday subtitled "Oui, nous pouvons!" -- the French translation of Obama's campaign slogan "Yes, we can!" -- urges affirmative action-like policies and other steps to turn French ideals of equality into reality for millions of blacks, Arabs and other alienated minorities.
"Our prejudices are insidious," Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a singer and wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy, told the Journal du Dimanche, which published the manifesto. She said she hoped the "Obama effect" would reshape French society.
France's lower house of parliament has 555 members from the mainland; one is black.
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