Word: leaders
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...Nearly ousted Senator Harry Reid, the current Senate majority leader, in a 1998 challenge. Reid defeated Ensign by fewer than 500 votes in a bitter campaign that cost both sides more than $8 million. Won a Senate seat easily on his second attempt in 2000, and fought off a long-shot bid by former President Jimmy Carter's son Jack...
...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...
...Which may be exactly what the Supreme Leader - who is the real power in Iran, with control over the military, the judiciary, foreign policy and the nuclear program - had in mind when, on June 13, he prematurely certified the phantasmic Ahmadinejad landslide. In the days before the election, reformers and principalists - including several Ahmadinejad advisers - told me that negotiations with the U.S. were likely, regardless of who won. "But it might be easier for the Supreme Leader to proceed if the tough guy is re-elected than if Mousavi is," said Mohebbian, the prominent principalist. "The negotiating team will...
...they continue to dally, Iran's electoral embarrassment will make it easier for Obama to rally other countries behind a tougher sanctions-and-deterrence plan that will further isolate Iran. But that may be exactly what the current regime wants. "Look, for the past 30 years, the Supreme Leader - first Khomeini, now Khamenei - has blamed all our problems on the Great Satan," a prominent conservative told me. "If you take away the Great Satan and we still have problems, how does he explain it? Almost everyone here is in favor of ending this war with America...
...impossible for an outsider, in Iran for 10 days, to sift through the governmental opacity, the contradictory demonstrations, and predict what comes next. It seems likely that no matter how many people flood the streets in protest, the Supreme Leader will continue to back Ahmadinejad. It also seems likely that while Barack Obama should continue to press for negotiations, he shouldn't be too optimistic about the prospect of success...