Joe Klein: What I Saw at the Revolution

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The reformers — and even many of the more prominent conservatives (who call themselves principalists) — considered these attacks outrageous, outside the rules of Iranian politics. "The attacks might have worked with Ahmadinejad's supporters," said Amir Mohebbian, a prominent principalist thinker who backed Ahmadinejad with some reservations. "But they were not good for the system." Indeed, Ahmadinejad's toughest debate was with the other principalist candidate, Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, who challenged the President's inflationary tendency to spend money on direct wealth redistribution — all sorts of stipends for the working class and the poor — while neglecting a long-term investment strategy. Unlike the older reformers, Rezaei refuted the President's arguments effectively. He directly addressed the Iranian people: "You go to the store. You know the price of cheese ... The people know what the real story is."

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But much of the cheese-buying public — the working class, the elderly, the women in chadors — seemed to adore Ahmadinejad. One of the favorite slogans of his supporters was "Ahmadinejad is love." On election day, Nahid and I went to Ahmadinejad's childhood neighborhood, Nazi Abad, and interviewed voters. The lines at the central mosque were every bit as long as they were at the voting stations in sophisticated north Tehran. There was a smattering of Mousavi supporters, but the Ahmadinejad worship was palpable. He was kind to the families of martyrs, one man said, which was true — Ahmadinejad had lavished attention on the veterans of the Iran-Iraq war and given special preferences for university admissions to their children. "He works so hard for us," an elderly woman in a chador said. "He doesn't sleep at night." A younger woman said, "He is the one person who really supports our class of people. Everyone has been insulting him, but I believe that the Messiah is supporting him. I saw it in a dream." (See pictures of Ahmadinejad.)

Mousavi, on the other hand, inspired little personal adoration. He was known as a tough and effective manager, and a favorite of Ayatullah Khomeini's during the early years of the Islamic republic — especially during the Iran-Iraq war — when he served as Prime Minister. But he had pretty much disappeared from public view for 20 years, living a quiet life as an artist and architect until he re-emerged as a polite prototype of the north Tehran élite. These were people — like the two former Presidents who backed his campaign, Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami — who seemed as concerned with Ahmadinejad's crude populist style as with his crude populist economics. Mousavi's wife inadvertently made plain the mind-set when I asked her about her husband's art and she told me, "Artists exist at the very top of a society. When an artist becomes President, it is a step down. But there's no way out. For the happiness of the people, it is necessary."

Mousavi seemed less pretentious. On the day before the election, Nahid and I interviewed him in a building he had designed, part of an art school and gallery complex in central Tehran. He seemed an exceedingly gentle man, soft-spoken to a fault — whisper-spoken, in fact. His most emphatic moment came when we asked about Ahmadinejad's attack on his wife. "I think he went beyond our societal norms, and that is why he created a current against himself," Mousavi said. "In our country, they don't insult a man's wife [to] his face. It is also not expected of a President to tend to such small details."(See the top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms.)

He also criticized Ahmadinejad's incendiary rhetoric on international issues like Israel and the Holocaust, as he had during the campaign: "In our foreign policy we have confused fundamental issues ... that are in our national interest with sensationalism that is more of domestic use."

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