Word: mousavi
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...President was, without question, the best politician in the race. His debates against the two reformers, Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were routs. Both challengers were exemplars of the older generation - the generation that made the Islamic revolution in 1979 - and both were flummoxed by a 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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Iran, I interviewed as many people who admired Ahmadinejad as were appalled by him. On election day at the Hossein Ershad Mosque in north Tehran, I spoke with Ismail Askari, the head of the taxi drivers' union in the city of Malard, just west of Tehran. He was a Mousavi supporter, but he admitted, "Most of the people in my cab have been happy with the present government...