Word: ahmadinejad
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...walked at first, then found a cab. But central Tehran had become an implacable traffic jam - and a gridlocked political debate. The Ahmadinejad supporters, many on motor scooters, skittered through the lines of automobiles, most of which were decked out with signs supporting the moderate challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. There was good-natured banter between the two groups. "Chist, chist, chist," the Ahmadinejad supporters chanted, referring to Mousavi's awkward, constant use of that word - Farsi for "y'know" - during his debate with Ahmadinejad. The Mousavi supporters chanted, "Ahmadi - bye, bye." After about an hour, our cabdriver gave...
...streets were getting very crowded now - and there was a giddiness to the scene. It was the sort of crowd that might gather after a football victory. The Ahmadinejad supporters, dressed in the red, white and green of the Iranian flag, seemed to be enjoying the freedom as much as the more flamboyant Mousavi supporters, who were draped in green. At one point, an Ahmadinejad supporter stuck his head out the window of his car and sang a lullaby, "Mousavi - lai, lai," in response to the students chanting "Ahmadi - bye, bye." The students laughed. It was as if someone...
...assumed that the Iranian presidential election was rigged, but it is impossible to know how heavily the government's thumb rested on the scales. It is entirely possible that Ahmadinejad would have won anyway, but narrowly, perhaps with less than 50% of the vote, setting up a runoff election he might have lost as the other candidates united against him. It is possible that his government, perhaps acting in concert with Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, decided to take no chances. (Read "The Man Who Could Beat Ahmadinejad: Mousavi Talks to TIME...
...even if the election campaign, in the end, proves meaningless, it provided a rare look at the divisions in Iranian society, and not just between the working-class Ahmadinejad supporters and the wealthier, better-educated backers of Mousavi. It also put the internal rivalries at the highest levels of the Iranian government on public display for the first time, and in the most embarrassing fashion...
...candidate who seemed to have been trained by some Iranian equivalent of Karl Rove. They appeared paralyzed by what they considered his coarse impertinence; in American terms, these might have been debates between George Bush the Elder and Newt Gingrich, a gentlemanly establishmentarian against a rude populist brawler. Ahmadinejad was a slick combination of facts and accusations. He spoke directly into the camera. He deployed little charts, as Ross Perot did in the 1990s, to show that things weren't as bad as people thought. His statistics were heavily massaged and challenged by his opponents, but he had muddied...