The White House has been encouraged by new opinion polls showing that fewer than a third of Americans favour President Clinton's impeachment. His job approval rating is holding fairly steady around 60 per cent.
The White House strategy is moving towards persuading the Republican-dominated Congress to drop the impeachment proceedings and to settle instead for a vote of censure which would allow the President to finish his term.
A CNN/Gallup poll shows that 60 per cent of those questioned on Sunday, two days after the Starr report was published, think that Mr Clinton should be censured.
There is little sign, however, that the Republican leadership is prepared to halt the impeachment process, at least until the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives has examined all the material attached to the 435-page Starr report.
Republicans will first want to be sure that there is no significant new information in the 2,000 pages of appendices and 17 boxes of tapes and transcripts before letting the President off the hook of the impeachment process.
The House is expected to vote later this week on guidelines for the judiciary committee as it begins work on the impeachment charges laid out by the independent counsel, Mr Ken Starr. But a vote on formally opening the impeachment investigation will not come until later before the house rises on October 9th.
The former senator, Mr George Mitchell, who chaired the talks leading to the Northern Ireland peace agreement, yesterday argued publicly against impeachment or resignation. Mr Mitchell was replying to a USA Today editorial which called for the President to resign, not because of his sexual behaviour but because he has "failed to put the nation's interest first".
Mr Mitchell, citing the President's record on Northern Ireland and the "hero's welcome from Protestants and Catholics alike" he received on the recent visit, writes that his actions "do not justify his removal from office by impeachment or resignation".
Mr Mitchell says that the President's "improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky was seriously wrong. It was indefensible. So, too, were his efforts to keep it from his family, his staff and the American people." But "the world needs strong American leadership. That means an active and effective President Clinton," Mr Mitchell writes.
President Clinton travelled to New York yesterday with Mrs Clinton to deliver a major foreign policy speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on the global economy. Later in the day, he attended Democratic Party fund raisers which brought in millions of dollars for the November election campaigns.
White House advisers pointed to this foreign policy address as an example of how the President is staying focused on his duties in spite of the distraction of the Starr report. During this week, Mr Clinton will attend a military readiness conference and host the visiting President of the Czech Republic, Mr Vaclav Havel, at the White House.
The Defence Secretary, Mr William Cohen, expressed guarded confidence in President Clinton when he was asked if he were capable of performing his duties as commander-in-chief in view of the revelations in the report. "I believe the President is capable of carrying out his responsibilities," Mr Cohen replied.
As the President addressed the Council on Foreign Relations, the Dow Jones index on Wall Street surged ahead by over 200 points. He called the current global economic crisis the "biggest financial challenge facing the world in half a century."
Urging the industrial nations to co-ordinate actions to boost economic growth, the President said that he had asked his Treasury Secretary, Mr Robert Rubin, and Federal Reserve Chairman, Mr Alan Greenspan, to meet their counterparts in the next 30 days to tackle the widening global crisis.
As the applause died down after his speech, a reporter shouted a question about whether the President would accept censure from Congress. Mr Clinton did not respond to the question.