Candidates running for President must speak to the emotional sentiments of voters in order to win. Tehran's mayor in his campaign is addressing the sentiments of voters, rather than just issues and policy goals.
One of the measures to gauge how popular a candidate will be in any Presidential election is how well he relates to a broad segment of the country's population. But, he will gain even greater success if he can actually set apart the various segments of society so that the people can identify the distinct classes of supporters or opponents and where they themselves fit into the picture. If a candidate runs an issue-oriented campaign, the victory line will never even be visible. It's necessary instead for the popular candidate that he define his candidacy in terms of who he is not. President George W. Bush in his re-election campaign of 2004 had a platform that was based primarily on what it meant to be a Republican, who he was as a man, and how his personal attributes would most effectively represent the true American people. His opponent, John Kerry, ran the opposite style campaign - and today, we are left with the memory of the failed Kerry issues. Those who supported the Democratic Senator were pushing specific issues and took whichever candidate got elected in the Primary, hoping he will continue with those issues in the fight against a sitting Republican President. Republicans really had only one message: We are Not Liberals. That sentiment carried enough people to the Polls. "Our President should not be a liberal," - the thought in one form or another in many voting American minds - was far stronger than "Anybody but Bush." The reason for this relative weakness is that although it was a driving force for people to go vote, it was not sufficiently forceful to overcome the former sentiment on the grounds that it was precisely Anybody But Bush on account of his Republican issues, and not that the man himself was lacking.
Today, the Iranian people have voted in an unprecedented run-off election to decide whether an "ultra-conservative" former Mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad, or former President and reform-leaning Rafsanjani will be cast in the role of Iran's President. Ahmadinejad ran a campaign that was strikingly similar to that of George W. Bush. He convinced certain segments of Iran's population that he was in direct contrast to the person of his opponent. The Iranian people could accept him as he was, because first of all, he was like them - simple, religious-minded, and with good values. He did not have the Rafsanjani mansion or his alleged corruption. This is precisely what he showed to the people - modest dress, an unshaved face, and simplicity. President Bush played the same game, but with cowboy gear and simple sentences about freedom and American values. He was as good as the common man, and from the campaign rhetoric we believed that he shared the same values as all good Americans. We were thus divided from the beginning. Back to Iran: The second reason that the Iranian people could accept Ahmadinejad was because he spoke a language that addressed above all - sentiments - and not issues.
This is the key to any election, even if you have, or especially if you have a strong agenda of reform with key goals. It is precisely then that you must speak to the sentiments behind those issues and not just to the points on the paper. Rafsanjani has a solid record that people could turn to in order to understand his platform - like privatization and his possible steps towards rapprochement with the U.S.; they could also predominantly hear in his campaign what he would do. Rafsanjani had only started to address the underlying sentiments of those Iranians who wanted to continue on the path of reform and economic liberalization. That was evident by the continued presence of a mass number of vote-abstaining reformists. Perhaps the short-campaign periods in Iranian politics overwhelmingly hurt the reformists this time around - they needed to pull the people's heart strings, and there was simply no time and no space among the majority of skeptical Iranian people who saw all candidates as Bad or Worse options. Rather, the short campaign worked in the favor of the conservative Mayor. All he needed was to put forward an image - one that symbolized the hopes, values, and sentiments of a large number of disaffected people.
We often speak about the preferences of voters, but concerns are significantly more important. It's critical to know how concerned people are about - more than issues - the direction of their government. How a citizen feels about the direction of government is a sentiment that holds more weight in determining voting patterns than issue preferences. The Iranian voters who chose Ahmadinejad were looking for a man who could articulate their concern that government was going in the wrong direction - away from the Islamic values of the Revolution and the core priorities held during the time of the Iran-Iraq war. President Bush spoke to the exact same segment of people in both the 2000 and 2004 elections and thus, attracted the voters who had for the most part unarticulated feelings that morality had disappeared from the government, and that strength and simple American virtues were vanishing to liberal issues that were arguably un-American. Rafsanjani needed to address the sentiments behind reform, the sentiments that make someone reform-minded. Many of those who voted for Ahmadinejad were voting on a sentiment of justice and accountability - issues similar to the time of the Islamic Revolution. Although Rafsanjani tried to seem down-to-earth, and devoted to reform - rather than being committed to his ties to the clerical rule. It was rather striking to see his campaign advertisements removing his clerical garb, and looking like the common man. But this was not effective enough to address the needs and wants of most Iranian people - who put their needs into a sentiment that the government was going astray from the ideals of the Revolution.
For some reason, people do not look for concrete reasons as to why they believe that their government is going in the wrong direction. Instead, they have scapegoats and choose to associate certain ways of thought or political parties with the trends in society that may be new or unsatisfactory. Concrete reasons do not include such thinking like in America, that democrats, liberals and socialists are penetrating the government to a level that is dangerous or that there are too many immigrants being let into the country. In Iran concrete reasons do not include that there is corruption or that the women are wearing too colorful headscarves. However, they see these as concrete justifications for a general negative and victimized sentiment about general trends - in the U.S., multiculturalism and in Iran, liberalization. If those are the concrete reasons for certain segments of the population to follow a candidate, then the other candidate cannot respond to the justifications. He must respond to the opposing sentiment. Rafsanjani, simply put, did not respond with an opposing sentiment to the fear that Iran would let whole classes of society fall into increasing poverty, dissolution, or dishonor.