In Iran, Even Some On Right Warning Against Extremes

One reason was the hard-line orientation of the Guardian Council, a screening panel that barred reformist candidates, producing a ballot skewed to the right.

That amplified another factor: turnout. The Basij civilian militia, and in last June's presidential contest the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, showed up most reliably at the polls, doing their duty as the core constituency Khamenei set out to create after succeeding Khomeini.

"The Basij is mainly a creation of Mr. Khamenei," said one Iranian analyst, who declined to be quoted by name. "They spent a huge amount of money to reinforce these military groups. Basiji people and even the Revolutionary Guard people are really an artificial social class, like an artificial island."

Ahmadinejad spent most of his career in both groups, and he wrote huge increases for each into his first budget as president. He commanded a Revolutionary Guard engineering unit during the 1980s war with Iraq, the defining experience for many hard-liners holding fast to the slogans of a then-young revolution, and he was a leader in the Basij.

"He's a true believer in the revolutionary values, which we believe in, too," said Mohammad Ali Tai, 61, as he squatted on a curb at Tehran University, where Friday prayers are held in the capital. Usually, a few thousand people attend. Most are veterans like Tai, who returned home to lives that failed to improve materially while the governing elites grew wealthy.

"I am a barber myself. I talk to many people," Tai said. "They are only tolerating this hardship because they believe in Islam. Some people who were in charge did not believe in these values, and this inequality is because of them."

Each week, Tai attends a Basij meeting, and well as a gathering of his hayat , a community group that mounts celebrations for religious holidays. When Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran, he provided the groups with rice at discount prices.

"Everything we do is actually a matter of keeping alive the revolutionary spirit," said Tai, who said he voted in the previous two presidential contests for Mohammad Khatami, a reformist. "But this time the Basij told us: Only vote for Ahmadinejad, and don't vote for anybody else."

If such groups were key to Ahmadinejad's electoral success, the cocooning cycle of their meetings -- offering mutual reinforcement and fealty to a shared vision -- provides insight into the staying power of his rigid outlook. Friends say he held to it stubbornly when others adjusted their views to the post-revolution realities that spawned Iran's reform movement.

"He always thought that was a deviation from the true path of the revolution," said Nasser Hadian-Jazy, who has known Ahmadinejad since grade school. "Equality, justice, humility, being simple, supporting Muslims, opposing global arrogance -- he was never ashamed of these principles. Never."

Hadian-Jazy, himself a revolutionary who evolved into a reformist, said he marveled at seeing his old friend wearing a checkered headdress around his shoulders on a university campus in 1998, a deeply unfashionable gesture at the height of the reform movement. "His sense of overconfidence, to me, that's not a positive point. But that's the way he is," said Hadian-Jazy, now a political scientist at Tehran University. "He's naive. The black and white area of his mind is a lot bigger than the gray area."

Insiders say these are the qualities that keep Iran's hard-liners in the extremes.