and political operator Rafsanjani, ruler of the country in the late 80s and early 90s, whose lavishly financed campaign -- complete with hi-tech rallies, bumper stickers and hijab -edrah-rah girls -- was overwhelmed by the protest votes of the dispossessed. Running on a platform of egalitarian redistribution -- 'put the oil money on the table of the poor' -- with a cd portraying his millionaire opponent living in the lap of luxury, while he gave much of his own salary to the needy, Ahmadinejad was the only candidate who could, with any conviction, put on street-cleaner's clothes to sweep the Tehran gutters. Against Rafsanjani's hollow establishment rhetoric, he called for concrete solutions to the housing crisis and unemployment, and the problems these caused for young couples wanting to get married, as well as promising an end to corruption and to compliance with us dictates on energy issues. [14] As a result, the campaign was sharper in tone and offered a more serious choice of social policy than did the elections of 2004 in the United States, or 2005 in Britain, and saw a higher turnout. Ahmadinejad reaped a harvest of discontent not only with the corrupt and brutal record of Rafsanjani's presidency, but also the time of his spineless successor. Under the reformer Khatami, economic conditions steadily worsened even as oil prices rose, while naive overtures in foreign policy, Gorbachev-style, merely produced Bush's Axis of Evil, much as the Russian versions met with Reagan's Evil Empire. Ready to defend the