Superb politicians that they are, the Clintons emerged from Tuesday's mid-term Congressional elections outwitting the Republicans who believed that all they had to do was impeach the President with the consent of the country. The election results would validate it, or so it was assumed.
Some Democrats may support impeachment, if they believe it is the correct way to proceed. But, judging by Tuesday's enthusiastic election turnout and the results, it is not what the public wants, and many Wall Street traders are among the nay-sayers. It's not good for the economy, they say. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr Newt Gingrich, a Republican, did not pay much attention to the enthusiasm of the voting public in an off-year - when elections are usually ignored - and neither did the besieged President in the White House. Those who rarely vote come out for the President.
Mostly they were the political outcasts of society: Hispanics, blacks, the native Americans, emigrants who have not made it yet and who may never make it, and the very poor. Many of them went to the polls on Tuesday and cast their votes - an obligation that nearly half the population avoids.
In Texas they voted - or many of them did - for Governor George W Bush, son of the former president. In a state with a large Hispanic population the governor speaks Spanish, which is also unusual. He describes himself as "a conservative with compassion". In Florida, many of the same sorts of people described above voted for the Texas governor's younger brother, Jeb, who ran in 1994 but lost to the Democratic governor Mr Lawton Chiles. Clearly the Bush brothers are not in the mould of other Republicans. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, an Illinois Democrat and an African-American, also attracted this "outcast vote". The Rev Jesse Jackson and Mrs Hillary Clinton came to help her but by then it was too late and she lost her standing as the only Afro-American senator. She was fighting a Republican opponent, Mr Peter Fitzgerald, who financed his campaign himself.
The "outcasts" gave victories in the Deep South to a candidate running against Senator Lauch Faircloth in North Carolina. They also supported Senator Ernest Hollings in South Carolina who, at the age of 76, was thought too old, but above all too independent and liberal, to run again.
He won the election on Tuesday with the votes of those who remembered that he was always a friend of the poor and that his programmes reflected that fact.
Julian Borger adds:
In the last few days of the campaign, President Clinton focused almost exclusively on the black vote, touring churches and African-American television channels, appealing for a strong turnout.
It was a tactic that apparently paid off. As early exit polls showed that 88 per cent of black voters backed Democratic candidates, and contributed to the party's victories across the South, an exuberant Rev Jesse Jackson called it Dignity Day.
The results were testament to a long-standing black empathy for the President, who has focused on racial issues and appointed record numbers of African-Americans to high public office.
Even his speaking style is reminiscent of black Baptist preachers in the South, and he has struck a chord by portraying himself as a people's leader persecuted by right-wing extremists.
The party wrested the governorships of Alabama and South Carolina from the Republicans, and a Senate seat in North Carolina, and it defied the pollsters' predictions by holding on to the Georgia governorship and a South Carolina Senate seat.
Mr David Bositis, an analyst at the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies, said black votes saved South Carolina's Democratic senator and gubernatorial candidate and had a decisive impact in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and possibly Maryland. There the black share of total votes jumped from 12 per cent in 1994 to 20 per cent.
Analysing the outcome, Mr Jackson warned against isolating the black vote, arguing that black, Hispanic and women's interests had converged.
The poll figures suggest that the Monica Lewinsky scandal made no impact on black voters' personal approval of President Clinton. He scored ratings of 89 per cent in both 1996 and this year. But his job approval ratings among blacks increased dramatically over the same period, from 60 to 85 per cent.
Mr Bositis said the economic feel-good factor had applied even more to black voters than the rest of the electorate. According to his polls, 51 per cent of blacks said their standard of living had improved in recent years, compared with 9 per cent who said it had deteriorated. The corresponding figures for whites were 32 and 18.
"Black poverty rate is at an all-time low," he said. "Unemployment is below 10 per cent and the median household income among blacks has risen faster than any other group in the last two years."
Black Democrats embarked on a three-day, get-out-the-vote bus tour in the final throes of the campaign, and the President went from one black church to another, playing on the civil rights issues of the election.