I've been thinking through what we saw last night and I think quite honestly that the Romney camp (for one of the very few times this cycle) out-planned and out-executed Team Blue. We've all seen the various comments that Obama was playing prevent defense, and he really did seem content to stick to some positives and avoid letting Romney score major points. Where I think the Romney team won the debate is by using the talk of zingers to put Obama into that mode.
In the run-up to the debate, there were a lot of comments trying to figure out what benefit Romney was going to gain from the zinger talk. In hindsight, it looks like they used that talk to get Obama focused on avoiding traps instead of making the strongest case against Romney that he could. That would explain why Obama was so reluctant to talk about 47%, women's rights, etc.
More importantly, it explains why Obama would be slow to respond to the bigger, more obvious lies, because the talk of zingers set those lies up as potential traps in the President's mind. This gave Romney the green light to spew the huge number of lies per minute, because the more he repeated something that had been repeatedly disproven, the more Obama would feel that he was baiting him to respond.
The real victory for Romney would be to stand toe-to-toe with the President and appear as a viable alternative for low-information voters who won't pay attention to fact-checking, which is exactly what happened.
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but you don't get to be Mordor's nominee without some heavy-duty skills in evil. I think in this case, they had a great strategy and they stuck to it.
You can see them trying to set up this strategy for next week as well with the talk of secret documents and October Surprises. It's up to the President's team to be ready to actually attack Romney's weaknesses next week rather than waiting for him to self-destruct.