The May 23, 1997, election of Muhammad Khatami unexpectedly closed the door on the Rafsanjani era and vaulted a new social movement into the highest echelons of the revolutionary state. Khatami was not the progenitor of the reform movement; nor was he its operational leader. Nonetheless, after his unexpected ascendance to the presidency, Khatami came to represent the reform movement as its standard bearer to both a domestic and an international audience. His policies and political choices defined the pathway for reform as explicitly incremental. The president's agenda was centered on a campaign that advanced the concepts of moderation, tolerance, accountability, and the supremacy of man-made law. These were revolutionary ideas in theocratic Iran; however, Khatami and his partisans scrupulously avoided revolutionary action.

These challenges, and the reformists' struggles to surmount them, earned the Iranian president unwelcome comparisons with another erstwhile reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose program of liberalization and minor political reforms inadvertently generated the collapse of the Soviet system and the shrinking of its imperial borders. The moniker that became attached to him – Ayatollah Gorbachev – first by his adversaries and later by his allies offers a pithy summary of both the promise and the problems associated with reforming the Islamic Republic. Khatami's detractors, beginning with his opponent in the 1997 elections, relished linking the president with the final Soviet premier. This analogy became the frequent theme of conservative journals and politicians, and it was deployed as a potent implicit warning about the consequences of unchecked reform and the hidden hand of American domination.

The comparison is subtly powerful – in implicating Khatami personally, it also evoked the more profound perils of an inevitably eroding system. For this reason, the supreme leader, among others, rejected the analogy and its implications. By the same token, Khatami's more ambitious allies increasingly brandished the resemblance to suggest the inevitability of public impatience and the imperative for the president to push harder for change.