"The election's over. It's time for a change," said Democrat Harry Reid, the presumed leader of the incoming US Senate, minutes after confirmation that his party secured a majority in both chambers of Congress in Tuesday's vote.

But apart from a handful of modest proposals expected to be adopted when the Democrats take over in January, including raising the minimum wage, the outlines of a Democratic era on Capitol Hill remain unclear.

The president's veto power will impose strict limits on the Democrats and the dominant issue of the election campaign -- the Iraq war -- rests almost entirely under the authority of the Republican commander-in-chief, President George W. Bush.

The first meetings between Bush and his new partners on Thursday and Friday were polite public rituals and clearly not the time for Democrats to set out a plan of action.

The two sides spoke "not in terms of details of what we would support or what he would support," said Steny Hoyer, a Democrat in the House of Representatives, who attended the post-election meeting at the White House.

Instead, the talks focused on Bush's "willingness and eagerness to work with us on passing legislation that we could agree on" while the president acknowledged there would be disagreements, citing funding for embryonic stem cell research as an example, Hoyer said on Fox television.

Bush said on Wednesday that he hoped for an agreement with the next Congress to raise the minimum wage without hurting small businesses.