While she could have used a few more of Thompson’s distillations of the effects of an Obama presidency, the next-day consensus was she had met the challenge. The elitists who were dead certain she would come off like a South Carolina beauty queen in her responses were dead wrong. She passed the third, and probably final, test of this political season. She held her own in debate with a 35-year veteran of the U.S. Senate. She aced the first two tests — her initial introduction and her first major address to the nation at the GOP convention. And she held her own on the third, confounding the critics who were poised to capture the responses they thought would cause her to destroy herself. Didn’t happen. And in that sense, she won.