“I swung and I missed a little bit with the law — I was good at it but it didn’t make me happy,” she says, referring to her nine years as a corporate litigator. “And I swung and I hit with this job. And I knew I would hit, and I did hit. And it felt good when I hit it, and I’m running the bases with aplomb.”

Before and after her show are O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, admitted opinionators who specialize, respectively, in cantankerousness and mongering. Megyn Kelly, whether she means to or not, markets herself as a break in the clouds, an interlude of lucidity, a host who protects her viewers by condensing complex issues into digestible bits, by cross-examining news analysis with zero tolerance for guff.

“Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?” she asked Karl Rove on the evening of Election Day last year, after the GOP architect said that Ohio was still in play despite data to the contrary.

“What makes you dominant and me submissive, and who died and made you scientist-in-chief?” she said to Fox contributor Erick Erickson in May, when challenging his controversial comments on studies of women as primary breadwinners.

The populace perked up each time.

Who is this woman?

She is a quick study, a true skeptic and a recovering perfectionist, ever since Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, called her into his office seven years ago, praised her confidence, then said “Now who’s the real you?”

“I was sort of taken aback that he wasn’t buying the persona I was projecting,” says Kelly, who previously was a daytime anchor on Fox’s “America Live” and “America’s Newsroom,” with Bill Hemmer. “I really thought I was fooling everybody into thinking I was this together. My words were chosen so perfectly and the script was done just right, and it wasn’t until [Ailes] said, ‘First of all, that’s bulls—, and second of all, the viewers can smell a phony a mile away,’ that I realized I was doing myself and my viewers a disservice.”