was there a plan to edward's hesitancy?

one of the criticisms i've heard regarding edwards debate performance is that cheney said a lot of BS that edwards didn't swat down. in general, i thought edwards didn't say much new, he just stuck to the same messages that kerry used successfully in the first debate. i had assumed this was because the kerry campaign didn't want to mess with what was working. cheney had clearly come up with counter-arguments to many of these messages, making the cheney-edwards match pretty much a draw. now i'm thinking/hoping that there was a reason for this strategy. cheney and the bush campaign had to retool and rebut, so they did homework and came up with defenses for some stuff... and now the kerry campaign can respond to these new arguments in the more important debates, instead of using damning evidence in a VP debate where nobody cares and giving the bush people a chance to prep him on responses. am i giving the kerry people too much credit? because if this is the plan it's pretty sweet.