On his third swing at trying to nominate a Supreme Court Justice, Ronald Reagan adopted the strategy followed by many a batter on the verge of striking out: he stopped going for the home run and tried for the political equivalent of a clean single. Rather than again choosing a hard-line ideologue to replace the moderate Lewis Powell, the President last week selected the kind of jurist many of his pragmatic supporters felt he should have chosen at the start. Indeed, he picked the very man they had been urging from the beginning: Anthony Kennedy, a thoroughly experienced appeals-court judge noted...
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