On Sunday, as Iranians woke up to a first day without sanctions in years, hardliners in Iran struck the first blow against Rouhani by disqualifying a significant number of moderate and reformist candidates in the vetting process.
Earlier this week Iran's interior ministry finalised the full list of approved candidates for the parliamentary election, due on 26 February, after the Guardian Council blocked a significant number of reformist contenders during the vetting process.
The assembly of experts is the body that votes to choose the new leader, but those expected to influence the vote are individuals from the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards Corps IRGCC) and the seminary in Qum, add to that the role both the conservative and the reformist camps take in the process.
Presumably, if that demand were met, it would constitute success, and it would signal a continuation of the reformist project, which saw change as an evolutionary process carried out inside the system by sympathetic élites.
Before the vote, most reformists were disqualified by the government's mercurial vetting process.
After an exhausting and contentious election process, Ashraf Ghani, a US-educated anthropologist turned reformist politician, has finally been sworn in as president of Afghanistan in the first peaceful transfer of power since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
There are many more examples of this process where corporate and other wealthy entities punish reformists by shifting financial support.
Now, the old platforms for reformist ideas parliament and the press have been silenced, the former by a rigged election process, and the latter by judicial bans and jail sentences.Debate has all but died, and the public mood is one of apathy and fatalism.
In the process, Beck has become something of a rising star in the reformist wing of American policing in large part due to his innovative community policing work.
Reformists have come to power in a relatively fair election, but the democratic process, as it now exists, pretty much stops at parliament's gates.
