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.
