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From President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's office and the sitting rooms of high-ranking mullahs to university campuses and the Farsi-language blogosphere, Iranians are following the American presidential race more avidly than ever before. That's partly because they're eager for the exit of President Bush, who branded Iran part of an "Axis of Evil" and implicitly raised the possibility of a military strike against the country over its alleged nuclear weapons program. But the Iranians' interest is also driven by a sense among many Iranians that the candidacy of Barack Obama offers real hope for repairing the U.S.-Iranian relationship. Commenting on the Iranian preference for a Democrat in the White House, Sergei Barseghian, a columnist for the reformist
Etemad Meli newspaper noted that in Farsi, the words Oo ba ma would translate as "
He's with us."
Senator Obama would be the first to disagree with that, of course, but the sympathy his candidacy has aroused among many Iranians stems from a variety of factors, including his African heritage, his partly Muslim family ties, and a belief that Obama would move to end Washington's 30-year Cold War with Tehran — or at least reduce the prospect of a U.S. military attack on the Islamic Republic. "I think people want him to win," Shi'ite cleric Mehdi Karroubi, the reformist former parliament speaker defeated by Ahmadinejad in Iran's 2005 presidential contest, told TIME.