Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post, The Audacity of Mendacity addresses the question of how long Romney can get away with piling up outrageous lies with little accountability. As Kilgore explains:

Can the president and his forces (with some possible help from MSM types who are probably embarrassed they didn’t mention Mitt’s factual challenges in awarding him the overwhelming victory last night) bring swing voters up to the level of informed cynicism that just about every regular political observer, D and R, felt while watching Mitt reinvent himself? I don’t see why not, though it would have been vastly more efficient to have done so during a debate being watched by 50 million people.
The more difficult question is how Mitt Romney follows up this reprieve and deals with the inevitable blowback. Sure, he’ll take a victory lap now, and you can expect his people to become an endless fount of upbeat chatter about Momentum and Enthusiasm and all that psych-ops jazz. Perhaps having now laid out his “vision for the country,” he’ll go right back to the old game of calling the election a referendum on the president and refuse to deal with all the questions about his agenda, which were increased, not resolved, by his debate performance….
…At some point, the blatant and continuing contradiction between what Mitt’s been telling “the base” and what he’s telling swing voters now will matter, even if, as seems far more likely today, the representatives of “the base” are willing to go along with the game, believing deeply that it’s voters, not they, who are getting zoomed.

As Kilgore concludes, “Mitt Romney negotiated a fine highwire act last night, but he’s still up there teetering, with a long way to go to safety.”