With Barack Obama’s estimated lead at 5.6%, the Democrats who panicked during John McCain’s bounce are looking pretty silly. It’s hard to believe that this was the state of the race a few weeks ago:

Mr. McCain’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate and the resulting jolt of energy among Republican voters appear to have caught Mr. Obama and his advisers by surprise and added to concern among some Democrats that the Obama campaign was not pushing back hard enough against Republican attacks in a critical phase of the race.

Some Democrats said Mr. Obama needed to move to seize control of the campaign and to block Mr. McCain from snatching away from him the message that he was the best hope to bring change to Washington.

In particular, the failure (thus far) of McCain’s vicious negative campaigning should underscore the weakness of the Rovian political approach that has received so much hype over the last decade. Any Republican strategist would have looked like a genius in the post-9/11 period — the president had sky-high approval ratings. But now that the political environment is unfavorable to Republicans, the Rove playbook (which is being ably executed by Steve Schmidt) has lost much of its potency.