President Bill Clinton has done it again. From the sordid debris of the Monica Lewinsky affair he has routed his Republican foes in an election which was supposed to give them new strength for his impeachment.

The President's name was not on the ballot, of course, but he and his wife, Hillary, took hold of a demoralised Democratic Party and energised its traditional support among African-Americans, women and labour unions to give it a stunning result in the mid-term elections.

Admittedly the Republicans still control both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but the psychological shock of a result that no one, not even the President, had predicted has left the diminished Republican majority in disarray the morning after.

The Republicans, who were expected to win seats, actually lost some in the House of Representatives and could only keep the status quo in the Senate.

Nothing like this has happened in a mid-term election for more than 60 years.

The impeachment process will not come to a halt, but where it is not going is now all too clear. President Clinton will not be dismissed from office for "high crimes and misdemeanours" on the basis of allegations in the Starr report.

Congress, which has the duty under the Constitution of impeachment and dismissal of presidents who commit serious crimes, has been sent a strong message from the American people that it must find some other way to punish Mr Clinton for his misdeeds.

The outgoing Congress had already got this message, and it was accepted as a fact of life that there would not be the two-thirds majority in the outgoing Senate or the new one needed to convict and dismiss President Clinton. But the ball is now in the court of the House which handles the impeachment stage.

The Republican majority in the House has been trimmed from 22 to 12, but it is still a majority which could yet vote to impeach President Clinton in the knowledge that this would not lead to his dismissal by the Senate. But would the chastened Republicans have the nerve to impeach a President whose party has won House seats in a mid-term election for the first time since 1934?

It is too soon to try and answer that question. The Judiciary Committee which is investigating the impeachment charges will resume its work next week and it will have to decide among its own members whether to vote an impeachment resolution, which would then be submitted to the full House.

It is important to remember that even if the Democrats did so well in the election, they did not regain control of the House and Senate, and the Republicans will continue to occupy the all-important chairmanships of the committees where much of Congress's work is done. So the agenda remains in Republican hands, and there will be many who are determined to make President Clinton pay for his misdeeds.

The proposal of the former Republican president, Mr Gerald Ford, that Mr Clinton should not be impeached but summoned before the House for a public rebuke to be agreed between both parties will be re-appraised. When Mr Ford made this proposal over a month ago, Republicans were in no mood for such half-hearted measures while Democrats would have welcomed it as a fair compromise which avoided impeachment.

But given the election results, President Clinton himself may wonder whether he merits even a congressional censure as the people have indicated that his personal life should not be a matter for political imbroglio.

Many Democrats who held their seats this week will be grateful for the way the President, his wife and Vice-President Al Gore travelled the country fund-raising and getting out the minority vote which swung marginal seats to the Democratic column. This has led to a paradox.

On the one hand, Democratic leaders say the results show the election was not a referendum on the President's fate. Instead, it showed that voters responded to the Democratic platform of saving social security, education and health care.

This is true, but it is also true that the exceptional high turn-out of African-Americans and their 89 per cent to 10 per cent vote for the Democrats was their way of showing their loyalty to a threatened President who has identified strongly with them and strives to eliminate racial prejudice.

Republicans will ponder the lessons of this election. It was not all bad news, but most of the good news came from the contests for governor. Massachusetts and New York, both strongly Democratic states, now have Republican governors. And George Bush jnr and his brother, Jeb, won easily in the key southern states of Texas and Florida.

The loss of California where the Republicans have held the governor's mansion for 16 years was a crushing blow, however, although expected. But the formula of a moderate, compassionate, less hard-edged Republicanism which is clearly a success in many states where there are about 30 Republican governors is seen as a model from which their congressional colleagues could learn.

The conservative, moralising wave of youngish Republicans which Speaker Newt Gingrich helped to sweep into the House in 1994 remain but in diminished numbers. But ideologues are out of touch with the mood of the country in the Clinton years as the economy thrives and ethnic groups become an important force.

Mr Gingrich, who a while back hoped for a gain of 40 seats in the House, is the target for much Republican anger. Democrats, perhaps unfairly, portray him as practically a Jean-Marie Le Pen figure on the extreme right, and making him a bogeyman has worked in 1996 and again this week.

Republicans will have to decide if they can afford to have Newt Gingrich as their most prominent political leader in 2000 when Al Gore will be aiming to keep the White House Democratic for another four years.

President Clinton can now rest assured that he will finish his second term in the White House where his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky once seemed to doom him to an ignominious ejection. He owes a huge debt to his tolerant wife who showed she has many presidential qualities herself as she campaigned in New York and California with great success.

This has been one of the most extraordinary years in American politics. There is egg on a lot of faces in politics and the media who have misread the deeper mood of the people outside of the Washington pressure cooker.

They have also underestimated the remarkable survival powers of a President whose boast is: "I go to work every day for the American people." And they agree that what he does in his spare time is his business.