Throughout President Clinton's crisis over the Monica Lewinsky affair, there has been a consistent thread of public scepticism as to how serious it has been for his political standing with the electorate. Yesterday's election results confirm the impression that voters consider the affair less culpable than does the Republican leadership in Congress and the political class and media inside the famous Washington beltway.
The outcome so dramatically bucks the historical trend of mid-term elections as to justify President Clinton's determination to fight for his political survival and against the efforts to impeach him. He emerges from the contest politically strengthened at home and abroad despite continued reservations about his personal conduct.
His Republican opponents cannot avoid political responsibility for this outcome. Their majority is down from 22 to 12 in the House of Representatives, they have held their position in the Senate but their share of governor-ships is substantially lower than might have been expected. In anybody's book, this is a defeat and a popular rebuke for the line they have put forward during the campaign which gave prominence to Mr Clinton's culpability and unsuitability for continuing as president and implicitly for the efforts to impeach him. The House Speaker and majority leader, Mr Newt Gingrich, must in particular bear responsibility for these political misjudgements. Commentators have been quick to underline the significance of gubernatorial victories by George and Jeb Bush in Texas and Florida, heralding a more moderate and pluralist Republican approach to national political issues.
Mr Clinton's name was not, of course, on any ballot paper. Nonetheless several prominent Democrat candidates, who avoided him initially, later virtually begged him to campaign on their behalf. The threatened party revolt in September failed to materialise and his instinct to hang on and fight, paying due regard to apologies and recriminations, has been amply justified by this result. Voters have shown themselves more influenced by the generally buoyant state of the economy and by health, education and welfare issues - in which they have marginally preferred the Democrats - than by the Monica Lewinsky affair.
The result therefore decidedly strengthens Mr Clinton in the domestic arena. He cannot be dismissed as a lame-duck president for the remainder of his term. He will have an opportunity now to fashion an agenda that can be handed on effectively to Mr Al Gore as the his heir presumptive. Above all, he will be more confident in dealing with the prospect of impeachment, secure in the knowledge that insofar as the decision can be made by reference to popular opinion, it is clearly against so proceeding.
Mr Clinton also emerges much stronger from these elections in the international arena. He did not let the Lewinsky affair divert him from close attention to Middle East negotiations, the Kosovo crisis, the world economy, or the Northern Ireland peace process. There is, of course, room for criticising his policies.
But the credibility of the US role has by and large not substantially diminished. It must be hoped now that with these elections completed, Congress can quickly resolve the impeachment issue and allow Mr Clinton leeway to exert the leadership the world expects and requires from a US president.