AMERICANS like the status quo. That is the unmistakable message coming from this election same President, same Republican Congress.
It is a scenario that does not seem too displeasing to Mr Clinton, who has spent two years distancing himself from his fellow Democrats and pitching his appeal as a President for all the people.
At the same time, the failure to win back either the House of Representatives or the Senate is a bitter blow to the Democratic Party and deprives its members of Congress of access to the powerful committee posts. The status quo was not what they wanted.
But winning the White House is the most glittering prize and that duly fell into Mr Clinton's lap. It would have been the biggest upset since Truman beat Dewey in 1948 if Bob Dole had pulled it off but he never looked a winner.
The exit polls spell out why Clinton was a clear winner and how the badly run Dole campaign never had a chance.
At the top of the list is the famous "gender gap". Clinton got 54 per cent of the women's vote compared with Dole's 37 per cent. They shared the men's vote with 44 per cent each while Ross Perot got 10 per cent.
Clinton also got 83 per cent of the black vote and 72 per cent of the Hispanic vote but together they only represented 14 per cent of the electorate. So white American women ensured Clinton's second term.
This does not mean that they particularly like him. But he was shrewd enough to plug the issues that women feel are important - leave for medical purposes, V-chips to screen out objectionable TV programmes, assault weapons ban, enforcement of child support from defaulting fathers.
More than half the electorate, told pollsters that they do not believe the President is "honest and trustworthy" and an even larger percentage say he has not told the truth about Whitewater and other matters under investigation. But many of these sceptics voted for the man they saw as flawed.
The wooing of the "soccer moms" vote became something of a joke among the media commentators but not for the President and his former adviser, Dick Morris, who, incidentally, did not endear himself to women by his year long affair with a Washington call girl and his wife's embarrassment when it became public.
The Morris strategy of re positioning Clinton to appear above the party politics of Capitol Hill included a careful attention to issues which appealed to middleclass women who spend hours in their station wagons conveying offspring to and from soccer matches, hence the sobriquet.
The President's liberal stance on abortion, compared with the Republican pledge to outlaw it, also helped him on an issue which is important for many women. His pro abortion stance and veto of a Bill banning a grisly late term procedure did not prevent him carrying the Catholic vote by 53 to 38 per cent.
The healthy state of the economy was another important factor in Clinton's success which straddled the gender division. Four years ago, Mr Bush was sent packing as Americans worried about unemployment and inflation, but this time all the economic indicators were giving Mr Clinton a lift. More people felt the country was "on the right track" and therefore less inclined to change the man at the top.
In the closing stages of the campaign, Dole went all out on the Clinton "character" issue, as he saw his proposed tax cut having little effect. There was much material for Dole here - abuse of FBI files, softness on drugs and fund raising in a Buddhist temple were all thrown into an indictment of the Clinton regime.
But it was in vain. The electorate had decided to give the President a second term on the strength of his performance on more mundane but important matters such as Medicare, anti crime measures and education.
At the same time, they were not prepared to give Clinton a blank cheque by handing him a Democratic Congress as well. A "split ticket" is a well known phenomenon of US politics. Usually, it has meant that a Republican president has had to work with a Democratic Congress but this time the situation is reversed.
After two years of working with a Republican majority in both Houses, Mr Clinton believes he is now well qualified to carry on a fruitful bi partisan policy with a technically hostile Capitol Hill.
Old foes such as Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Leader, Dick Armey, were sending signals on election night that they were prepared to work constructively with the President. They had both learned the lesson of Gingrich's ill fated "Contract with America" two years ago when the electorate took fright at a Republican "revolution" which led to shut downs of government and assaults on Medicare and Medicaid.
But the Republicans will also have to decide if bi partisanship on issues such as balancing Budget and reform of election financing means that they will have to curb future Congressional investigations into Whitewater and its related scandals, real or imaginary. The new Republican majority has it in its power to continue investigating President Clinton, his wife and their staffs on these murky matters.
Finally, there is the future of Ross Perot and his Reform Party. Many observers see this election, which cut his 1992 vote of 19 per cent in half, as the end of this latest attempt to create a viable third party in American politics. But even if Perot had stood down, the President would have still won.